The Big Black by Symon (Ken Follett) Myles

Off the bat, this is a very hard book to track down and super expensive when you do. When I read and reviewed the first "Apples" Carstairs thriller from a young Ken Follett I wasn't sure I'd ever track down the remaining two in the series, I can rarely match wallets with "serious" book collectors and a big name like Follett bring them out. This copy of the second Apples book popped up on eBay as a buy-it-now but still out of my price range and it didn't sell for a while. The seller must have gotten impatient to unload it and dropped the price for an auction. Long story short after a small bidding war I ended up with it, paying more then I like to pay for a old paperback but well under what I suppose the book is worth. The downside now is that there's still "The Big Hit," the third book in the trilogy roaming out there. The only copy readily available online having Follett's signature and is well past three-hundred dollars. Maybe lightning will strike and I'll end up lucky with the final book in the series. Or maybe Follett's staunch resistance to reprinting them will wain. He might need to repair his car again which is the whole reason the books exists in the first place, a busted down car and a need for cheap paperbacks. Which is the sort of stuff I love to hear about.

Apples is a quasi-vigilante and rich guy. He's got a successful business that he rarely has to do anything keep up, two girlfriends to keep him company, fancy clothes and a sweet Jaguar. He's also got a squirrelly background as a street-kid, crime reporter and general dude-in-the-know. He's a rank amateur in the world of vigilantism, he's no Mack Bolan, Sharpshooter or Lone Wolf. Being an Englishman there's no packing heat and as he says in the this book a "pen-knife would ruin the lines on his suit," but what he lacks in hardware he makes up for by being both VERY lucky and pretty plucky. I very much enjoy the first book in there series when a lot of more reputable firms like Paperback Warrior didn't care for it at all. It didn't dawn on my why I liked it so much until I was knee-deep in the second book. I was picturing "Jason King" actor Peter Wyngarde as Apples and envisioning a low-rent groovy English crime-caper B-Movie while I read. Which would have just be amazing.

The most 70's author photo ever

The plot of "The Big Black" is a bit convoluted and rambling, seat of the pants writing, surely, but a lot of fun. There's photos of Apples and his two girlfriends in bed, minor threats of blackmail, major threats of blackmail, gun-running, random shagging, running from the law, trips around Europe, Apples kills a few people with nice improvised weapons (a razor stuck in an APPLE, get it?) and murdering of the a company via the stock market. Apples jumps at the chance to play cops and robbers after spending time in the country with his daughter who was the jumping-off-point of the revenge of the first book and is recovering from a drug overdose. Overall this is a stronger book than the first entry, it's played pretty much all for fun thrills without the melodrama involving his daughter that sort of bogged down "The Big Needle." It's a very interesting "avenger with style," series, as the ad for the series in the back puts it, a rank amateur matching wits and brawn against far more capable villain's. It's a really solid little time-capsule of a caper novel, light-hearted with dollops of hard violence.  

Follett really has very little to be embarrassed about, it's a very fine example of 70's crime-pulp and a lot hipper (at the time) then it's contemporaries. He nails the groovy nature of the time and the sleazy bars and greasy pubs. There's far worse out there and it might be fun for his audience to get a full introduction to Apples Carstairs, if only in ebook or perhaps a nice omnibus.