re:mote voices

Title: The Lonely Dead
Author: Michael Marshall
Publisher:HarperCollins

As Michael Marshall Smith he has published three novels, each of which presents a kind of twisted science fiction, one which is unique to his style. The Straw Men started out as a MMS novel, but somewhere along the line became more straight, a crime thriller, which might cause some problems with his established style, even if, as far as he was concerned, he was writing in exactly the same manner. This brought about the decision to create the new writing name of Michael Marshall, providing some kind of guide line should it be needed for those who like one style and not the other.

While The Straw Men felt a lot straighter than his previous work, it still was a reasonably readable thriller about a serial killer and those trying to catch him. The result seems to be that The Straw Men has made Michael Marshall more well known than Michael Marshall Smith. Luckily Marshall had decided that his follow up to The Straw Men would quite literally be a follow up to The Straw Men. Unfortunately the original title which he planned to use for this sequel was not well received by his publishers, leading to the perhaps confusing circumstances of the UK publishers accepting The Lonely Dead as a replacement, while the US publishers preferred The Upright Man.

With an initial skim of the description for The Lonely Dead, it is not initially obvious that it is a sequel, but once you start reading it becomes very clear – the second in what Marshall envisages as a trilogy, his next book being the conclusion of the sequence. The Straw Men introduced us to the three “heroes” – Ward Hopkins, ex-CIA, parents murdered; John Zandt, ex-LAPD, daughter murdered by a serial killer; Nina Bayman, FBI, investigating the serial killer, and becoming involved with Zandt as a result. The Straw Men brought the characters together and built to an explosive climax, the events of which are repeatedly referred to through The Lonely Dead – such that while The Lonely Dead can probably be read without The Straw Men, a reader would likely find that their view of The Straw Men was tinted if they then went back the way.

Certain things are left unresolved with the end of The Straw Men, providing a base point of The Lonely Dead. A powerful and long lived organisation has been revealed, and with The Lonely Dead, we follow Hopkins as he goes into hiding, fearing for his life, contrast by Zandt, who seems to be determined to find out all he can. The discovery of a mass grave starts the book off, quickly followed by Bayman’s involvement in the investigation of the latest potential serial killer – a cam girl is found dead in a hotel room, with a clue left in her mouth.

The change in style from MMS to MM was clear with The Straw Men, the narrative more restrained by convention and the fact that the story was trying to fit into a real world – a first outside his short story work. This probably affected a reading of The Straw Men for anyone familiar with his previous work. However, either he has hit his stride better with The Lonely Dead, or we have a better feel for what he is doing with this work. Such that The Lonely Dead is easier to get into and on the whole more enjoyable than The Straw Men – though certainly this invites the reader to go back and re-evaluate that previous edition. Here we are more conscious of the themes and ideas, the commonalities of both identities style.

The consistent lead characters, hard and capable of violence, but driven by a dark past, that mixes grief with a reluctance to do what has to be done, at least until it has to be done. With Hopkins we also get a sense of the other space present in the work of Michael Marshall Smith, the idea of some other fringe element, an alternate – of course, in The Lonely Dead, that fringe is one which is closer to here and now, that of the decrepit, Hopkins travelling from deserted building to deserted building – finding these grey spaces, ghost spaces of a dead culture and inhabiting them as he becomes something of a ghost himself, avoiding the reality that would bring him back into tune with the world. This kind of thing also comes in with the possible sightings of a big foot, the rants about conspiracy theories, and the manner in which all of that might just tie in to the origins of the straw men.