COLD BLOOD REVIEWS
"Set during the Russian revolution and its bloody aftermath, this is as much tongue-in-cheek historical romp as page-turning cliffhanger....If writers can be divided into minimalists and maximalists, then Fleming is out there on the militant wing of the maximalists..... relentless energy and garrulous black humour ....Cold Blood has an original and talented voice behind it"
Adam Lively, The Sunday Times, March 29th 2009
"The prose is tight, brusque and colourful. The book also gives off a reassuring sense of authority - Fleming clearly knows his stuff. The bare outline gives little idea of the sheer energy of the novel. The story rattles along like an absconding locomotive. It's not for the squeamish - Fleming's Russia is a brutal place, but his hero is well able to deal with it on its own terms. Doig may operate in a John Buchan world, but he gives the impression of being permanently high on steroids, amphetamines and the occasional dose of viagra. He is almost as terrifying as the revolution itself"
Andrew Taylor, The Spectator
"formidably written: muscular prose, salty dialogue, vivid imagery, an aversion to cliché and the ability to shoot off on intriguing digressions.
More than that it has a distinct atmosphere and Fleming has made a fine job of getting into the minds of men with nothing to lose"
Toby Clements, The Daily Telegraph, March 28th 2009
From The Times, London, March 7th 2009
Cold Blood by James Fleming
The Times review by Giles Whittell
Note to Jonathan Cape: the blurb on the inside back flap of the jacket of Cold Blood does James Fleming no favours. It tells us, first, that he's the great Ian Fleming's nephew. Then it lists what else he's been in his 63 years besides rip-roaring quasi-historical thriller writer: Oxford history graduate, accountant, farmer, forester, bookseller.
Making this - what? The work of a dilettante with a name, written for his own mild amusement and to show anyone who was wondering that there's really nothing to this fiction lark?
Nothing personal, but I would have preferred to know nothing about this Mr Fleming. Then I would have suspended scepticism and been grabbed and swept along by his extraordinary use of plot and pace and language that much sooner.
This is a thriller, no bones about it. It operates by hitting its marks and folding its back-stories as precisely as a 120-page movie script. Speaking of movies, there are as many bullets and somersaulting bodies here as in a John Woo gangster flick, and there is a testicular laceration scene that makes the one in Casino Royale look thoroughly inhibited.
But gore is not Fleming's USP. It just drenches his chosen territory as a matter of historical fact. That territory - Russia, 1917-18, crawling with Bolsheviks and convulsed by civil war - may feel familiar to fans of Pasternak and his imitators, but it is still the reason to read this book.
Fleming is far too impatient a writer to build any of his characters layer by layer. In fact he snaps them together rather as he tears them apart, limb by limb. But he defies you to nit-pick about characterisation and related trivia with the sheer energy and inventiveness of a prose style (“God damn all thinkers”; “Russia, oh Russia! World without end ...”) that is perfectly suited to the grotesqueries of his subject.
That subject is Russia, and revenge, and a bit of redemption. Our hero, back for more mayhem after a previous outing in White Blood, seeks the grisly end, the grislier the better, of a mythic No3 to Lenin who raped and tortured his wife for being an aristo.
Into the pursuit of the flabby, dwarfish, sub-Blofeld Prokhor Glebov by the towering, irresistible, beyond-Bond Charlie Doig are dragged a seductress who makes her first move in a crowded tram, a Mongolian psychopath on a horse called Tornado, a preposterous American cryptographer and, of course, an armoured train.
For anyone who feels that there aren't enough armoured trains in today's popular fiction, or enough murderous White Russians with God and destiny on their side - and I am one - this book is a must.
Andrew Barrow
DEATH ON THE TRACKS
Cold Blood
By James Fleming
(Jonathan Cape 336pp £16.99)
The swirling snowstorms and ongoing economic confusion and casualties of early February provided this reviewer with the perfect atmosphere in which to read this bitterly gruesome novel set in the revolutionary, corpse-strewn Russia of 1918.
The story begins in St Petersburg a few days before Lenin’s coup. The fate of the Tsar and his family is in the balance. Though still puffing away at Ortega Grande cigars and knocking back ninety-year-old cognac from silver flasks in their chauffeured Rolls-Royces, capitalists, aristocrats in long fur-edged coats and other privileged types are on the run. Shit, vomit, fog, mud and Bolshevism fill the streets.
Enter, or rather re-enter, Charlie Doig, hero of James Fleming’s last wintry offering, White Blood. Half-Scottish, half-Russian, Doig immediately reminds us that he started life as a naturalist and hit world renown at twenty-three by capturing an absurdly rare beetle in a post office in western Burma. Now he is twenty-nine and in pursuit of the monstrous human being called Glebov who raped, tortured and mutilated his aristocratic young wife at the end of the last novel. Lusty, lovesick, ruthlessly resourceful and almost psychopathically awash with adrenalin and the ‘hot, scarlet, elite blood’ of his Russian ancestors, our hero is determined to avenge her.
Much of the action takes place on board the private locomotive Doig quickly buys – a stash of diamonds has been sewn into his boots – along with its American-built Pullman carriages, ‘gorgeous in their yellow-and-chocolate livery’, which once belonged to Grand Duke Dimitri. Armed with the best modern German guns and accompanied by a ragtag private army, a one-eyed stallion and a girlfriend called Xenia who has ‘proper Russian buttocks’ and ‘eyes as green as the sea’ (and a ‘birthmark purple’ blouse), Charlie Doig heads for Siberia, buffeted by machine-gun fire from a circling Fokker aircraft piloted by his arch-enemy.
Along the way, Charlie learns that the late Tsar’s gold reserves worth eighty million dollars are hidden somewhere on the route and, though vaguely agreeing that gold-digging is only for ‘kiddies’ storybooks’, decides that, after settling with Glebov, he will also grab this prize. The story reaches its stupendous climax in the remote city of Kazan, where the air carries all the smells of the River Volga: ‘Cordage, wet tarpaulins, creosote, tobacco, dried fish, motor oil, sails, boats, the effluvium of Kazan’s drains’. Cleverly the author leaves room for a third novel by not quite killing off the villain or seeing his hero and his gold into a safe harbour, let alone the Chicago he dreams of.
There are times when Cold Blood seems as cumbersome as Russia itself, with almost too many wonderful characters – I was particularly tickled by a stationmaster with a gold watch chain ‘as thick as a skipping rope’ – being introduced and then abandoned or, quite literally, killed off. But Doig’s ultra-masculine, semi-brain-rotted character will surely exercise a mesmeric power over most readers.
And, as in his previous novel, James Fleming’s text sings with finely tuned nature notes. First spotted by Glebov in St Petersburg, our hero expects to be shot in ‘the sixth thoracic vertebra’; the screaming tyres of a Bolshevik limousine remind him of the noise a pig makes when it sees the knife; and on spotting the ugliest mastiff in Siberia humping a pop-eyed Cavalier King Charles, he decides this is exactly what Lenin is now doing to Imperial Russia. Even some rooks caught up in the crossfire may have been dislodged from their ‘ancestral nests’. And what about the pye-dogs who lap up the blood dripping from the carts carrying executed Bolsheviks? Or the flesh flies that settle on a man’s cock when he is pissing? This novel revives the idea of Death as a person – ‘and his girlfriend, Time’ – but offers us little in the way of consolation besides a comforting glimpse of the stars in the night sky ‘bright with their wry humour’ and the handy fact that caviar stains irreversibly.
