Sun 1 Nov 2009
A Review by Bill Crider: DOUGLAS RUTHERFORD – Kick Start.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews1 Comment
DOUGLAS RUTHERFORD – Kick Start. Walker, US, hardcover. 1973; Ballantine, pb, 1976. UK editions: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1973; Fontana, pb, 1975.
The hero of this book is really not a person; it’s a motorcycle, a Norton Commando to be precise. And while reading the story isn’t as much fun as being able to ride as well as the protagonist does, it’s a close second.
Kroll commits a crime, gets caught, and is recruited to penetrate an area ravaged by earthquake, accessible only to a skilled biker. He narrowly gets to his destination (a particularly good scene has him crossing a cracking dam), and then things get worse (the dam breaks; the race in front of the flood waters is another high point).
One of the most entertaining things about the book, though, is the large number of flaws in the plot — or what appear to be flaws. The reader keeps thinking that the author is doing a really sloppy job, right up until the end, when suddenly the flaws are shown to be in Kroll’s interpretation of events.
He’s been wrong all along; the reader has been right. And the bitterly ironic ending somehow seems highly appropriate.
Editorial Comment: I regret to say that I have not turned up a cover image of the Ballantine paperback, but these two should easily do.
Rutherford, whose full name was James Douglas Rutherford McConnell, 1915-1988, has a total of 25 titles in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, most of them dealing with motorcycles or motorcar racing (e.g., A Shriek of Tyres (1958), The Gunshot Grand Prix (1972) and Rally to the Death (1974)).
Of more immediate significance, though, is that under the pen name Paul Temple, he co-authored two novels in that series with Francis Durbridge. See the preceding post.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:51 am
Rutherford is good, and capable, as here, of pulling a rug out from under an unsuspecting reader. As Bill Crider suggests we readers are sometimes too suggestible to a narrator and tend to assume he knows what he is talking about. In that way Rutherford sometimes approaches those famous twists we associate with Agatha Christie or Alistair MacLean books.
Rutherford wasn’t reprinted over here as much as he should have been, but he is, in his own way, as clever with racing cars and motorcycles as Dick Francis with horses. He rings a lot of variations on the theme.
On a similar theme, though not Rutherford, Stop Me Before I Kill (1961) about a racing driver who begins to dream he will kill his wife after an accident on the track is now available as a DVD (Region 1). It stars Ronald Lewis and Claude Dauphin, directed and written by Val Guest based on Ronald Scott Thorn’s suspense novel Full Treatment. The book is a psychological drama rather than a mystery per se but quite entertaining.
Thorn also wrote the suspense novels Second Opinion and Twin Serpents, and the novel that became the classic comedy film Upstairs Downstairs (no relation the the Masterpiece Theater one)about the trials of a young couple who hire an attractive au pair.