Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on a train.
The warm-blooded heterosexual in question is Charlie Doig, the Russo-Scot hero of Fleming’s previous novel, White Blood. And instead of a suburban branchline to Ealing, the train in question is an armoured one that’s crisscrossing Russia in the days after the revolution, staffed by Doig and his lover, along with various remnants of the ancien regime and an American soldier who may not be all that he seems. Originally, the purpose of Doig’s journey is to find his nemesis, Glebov, but when he discovers that both Glebov and the Tsar’s gold reserves are in the city of Kazan, he forms a plan that will combine vengeance with the capture of incredible personal wealth.
With some occasionally jarring descriptions (e.g. “He licked his lips like a woman on heat”) and a narrative voice that oozes testosterone, it would be a surprise to see Cold Blood feature on any university literature courses in the future; yet anyone interested in how to construct a fast-moving plot and inject new life into a tired genre could learn a lot from Fleming’s novel: once he’s got past the first three chapters, which provide a handy summary of White Blood for anyone who hasn’t read it, the pared sentences and short, action-packed chapters help to build a fast-moving rhythm that draws the reader to the close as relentlessly as the train pulls Charlie towards his fated appointment with Glebov, providing just the right amount of twists to maintain interest throughout.
As with all the best protagonists of thrillers, Doig is a curious mixture of the moral and the amoral – swearing vengeance on Glebov for raping his (now dead) wife in one sentence, then waxing lyrical about the virtues of his mistress in the next – but he’s mostly entertaining company, even with his myopic view of history (Bolsheviks all bad; Whites all jolly good chaps).
However, while Doig is the kind of character/voice that may provoke envy in many novelists, the intimacy that the first person narrative invites works against the dramatic tension at the end of the novel. While some readers won’t give it a second thought, I found it quite hard to believe in the danger of the final showdown with Glebov when the story is told in a past tense voice that acts throughout as a guarantee of the hero having survived. That is a minor quibble though. With its snowy wastes and hotblooded women, Cold Blood is actually ideal reading for the side of a pool somewhere, and suggests that Fleming deserves to sit alongside his uncle on the thriller shelves as much on merit as name.