Mixed Blood by Roger Smith

Jason Chambers: I was a bit surprised when the guys pointed me toward this book as review option, as it initially seemed like something I would not pay much attention to. It looks like just another thriller, and with us having recently reviewed Beat the Reaper, and evokes a lot of the similar motifs from that book.

Two meth-head Cape Town gangsters on an unrelated errand break into Jack Burns’ house and end up dead. Of course, he can’t call the cops, since he and his family are on the lam from U.S. authorities. So, he disposes of the bodies, and, as we know from many other thrillers, sets a chain of events into action that endangers his family, puts him on the run again, and enters conflicts and accords with characters from Cape Town’s dark underbelly.

I liked a lot about this book. First, the use of Cape Town as a setting is a great choice. Smith’s characters move through the landscape, revealing apartheid’s remnants – racism, social inequality, political corruption, and a healthy drug and gang culture. A great comp to this aspect of the novel is Pelecanos‘ hard look at Washington DC, or an earlier Richard Price.

And the ancillary characters are intriguing, too. Rogue cop Rudi Barnard thrashes innocent and guilty alike with a religious fervor that recalls a nightmare version of Burke’s Clete Purcell. Benny Mongrel – an amazing and apt moniker – an aging ex-con with a mean streak for people and a soft spot for his dog. Fingers. A Government Councillor with his revenge on his mind. Pretty fun stuff.

On a slightly negative note, I did think that Jack Burn was pretty much the standard fare as a protagonist: Ordinary Joe who gets himself in trouble with the mob or the cops, goes on the run, gets outed by a screwy coincidence, and has to save his family, etc. He’s fine, but doesn’t drive things forward or distinguish himself in any way. Capetown and its characters steal the show.

Most thriller readers will find this highly entertaining.

Dennis Haritou: I agree with the astute JC, who reads more thrillers than I do and has more expertise in the field, in his assessment of this charnel house of depraved characters. But the characters that stand out for me are those from “The Flats”, a largely lawless Capetown ghetto/slum. The Flats are a maze-like expanse of run-down one room shacks with hot tin roofs and fallen-in fences and multiple dwellings that would make any slumlord proud. It seems like most of its residents have never left the place. And if you are a stranger there, once in, you might not be able find your way out. But if there were tours, I’d go. To most of its residents, it seems like it’s the whole world and Roger Smith makes it come alive from that POV.

Like any dangerous urban sprawl it contains a lot of ordinary, decent folk just trying to hang on as well as more than it’s share of psychopaths, addicts and felons. But I found this ghetto picturesque: a hermetic environment with its own slang, its own customs and its own distinctive appearance. I think this tale was juiced when it was in this terrain and suffered oxygen depletion when it was out of it. It’s worth reading the book just to savor the uniqueness of this drug and crime-blasted community.

I found the body count with their brain splattered heads and severed body parts mind-numbing after a while. I even rewrote the story in my head as a recoil from all the sadism and gore that the citizens of Capetown apparently enjoy or suffer through in their daily lives. (Hey, I have friends who have been to Capetown and I know it’s a beautiful place.) In my ghetto cozy version, Benny Mongrel, my favorite character, proceeds through the Flats with his beloved dog Bessie like some disfigured Miss Marple, solving crimes but still having time for late afternoon tea while Bessie enjoys one of her favorite dog biscuits. I could take about 20 of these in a series. But that’s not what we got in Mixed Blood. We got Roger Smith as the Mickey Spillane of Capetown. Roger Smith is no Agatha Christie but as Mickey Spillane, he rocks.

Jason Rice: I think what appealed to me most about this book was the brutal internal force that all of the characters had in some form or another. They were making their own luck, for better or worse, no matter what. From the very first page you knew you were in for a tough ride, and I couldn’t put this book down. I felt involved in each person as we discovered that there are no happy endings in life and besides getting born into this world you don’t really get many breaks. Jack Burn surveying the nighttime sky in the first moments knows that somewhere out there someone is out to get him and that it’s only a matter of time before they catch him. The overwhelming sense of foreboding that bubbled onto the surface after every chapter was really wonderful to read.

The body count didn’t matter to me, this is cinematic style spread into a novel, much like Beat the Reaper, this book is slumming in a worn out genre. Roger Smith shows an amazing aptitude by revealing each character slowly over the course of one story and I noticed that the narrative actually had cycles, first Burn kills the intruders, and then Benny Mongrel slowly curls into action, followed by corruption extraordinaire, and it suddenly moves to match point, but then
compresses until it comes out the other side of the black hole that is Cape Town with a myriad of reasons for every action. Each character’s decisions are based only in greed, nothing more. Jack Burn decided at one point decided that the normal life, ball games and barbecues (to quote Michael Mann) isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and that taking a risk is almost as risky as doing the 9 to 5 grind. He knew there would be a downside but he did it anyway.

I loved Burn’s wife, his kid, the maid who finds the sharp end of the story, and hot furnace wind that blows in from the mountains. I was surprised to pick up two thrillers in a row, this and Beat the Reaper, as I don’t ever read these kind of books. Roger Smith portrays his setting so well I felt like I was there, and he did it without breaking a sweat, Cape Town, nice place if you’re rich, a lot like America. The characters of this story will make a lot of people sit up and take notice. Even the package of the ARC was crisp and sharp. I found a great many things to like in this book, and if anything, this novel is the text book example of great genre writing.

JC: Strangely enough, we’re all more or less in agreement. Smith’s Cape Town is Hobbesian in its brutality and the struggle for superiority, and the unraveling of the characters’ plans seeps into the landscape. I like Dennis’ comment about the ghetto versus the hills. I had the same impression of the differences, but thought of the highlands where the rich people live as oxygenated and expansive, but the ghetto as suffocating and desperate. I think JR nails it too, when he says Mixed Blood is great genre writing. What we sometimes forget looking for the next great read is that great genre works can be great works, period. Let’s face it, for everything that gets passed off as literary fiction, or general fiction, only a small percentage really hold up to scrutiny. Such is the case with genres, too, but I’ll leave it to others to question the numbers.