Forgotten Book - Dead Heat

Dead Heat, first published in 1986, is a lively example of Martin Russell's skill as a crime writer. I've always liked his work and I wrote about him in a recent The Life of Crime Premium newsletter. He was good at conjuring up baffling situations which confront ordinary people who may or may not have been tempted to solve their problems by committing a crime - usually murder. He was also very readable, so that you can gulp down his stories pretty quickly. This technique, when used shrewdly, is also a good way of making sure that your readers don't start worrying about some of the unlikelier plot developments!

His protagonist here is another of the ordinary, flawed men who populate so many of his standalone novels. Marvin Pike is a man of thirty (who seems a lot older to me in the way he thinks and behaves) who is married to the lovely but lazy and faithless Arlene. He persuaded her to marry him with some pathetic big talk about making a million, but his ambitions of making a fortune were always pie in the sky.

Instead, he's running a shop that is struggling, in partnership with an old school friend, Gareth Somers, who handles the financial side of the business. Arlene has given up serving behind the counter and Marvin has become dependent on the help of a young woman called Gail. These four people become embroiled in an intriguing set of events when Marvin, having turned a blind eye to Arlene's adultery with Gareth, discovers that his partner is also robbing him blind. The worm is ready to turn...

There's one terrific plot twist in this book. The dust jacket blurb gives away a great deal of the story (not the only time that Collins Crime Club did this, regrettably), and I'm not going to follow suit, but I will say that although I struggled to warm to Marvin, I did enjoy the novel. A good, fast read, typical of Martin Russell's better work.