by David Gemmell

Gollancz, out May 18

CONFESSION: I make no bones about the fact that I’m a huge Gemmell fan, you need to know that coming into this review. I have first edition hardcovers of every book he released during a long career, and count Waylander as one of the core inspirations that made me want to become a writer and shaped more than half of my life. I’ve also got Les Edwards’ original artwork of the Century edition of King Beyond the Gate hanging on the wall above my desk. I held off a decade before reading the final Rigante novel, finally cracking the spine on the tenth anniversary of his passing. I wasn’t ready to read it before then because it felt like saying goodbye. I was also, I think, the last person to interview him (for SFRevu, which contained the now haunting answer: I can’t say what the future holds, past completing the second and third Troy novels, Shield of Thunder and Fall of Kings. I am in my sixth decade. I smoke heavily, drink more alcohol than is considered good for me, and have a passion for chocolate and foods full of animal fats. In short, in health terms, I am a walking disaster waiting to happen).

With that on the table, you can probably guess that as far as I’m concerned, even a lesser Gemmell is better than the best of a lot of writers working in the field today. He was the king of heroic fantasy for a reason. The man could craft action like no one else, with pared down minimalistic prose that let your imagination paint in so much more than was on the page and yet felt like it had always been there. One of my favourite scenes in Legend isn’t actually in the book, it’s an encounter with a guy in a bar who picks a fight with the axeman, Druss, and the entire fight is encapsulated in the two words ‘He died.’ I remember raving about the brevity of this scene and how impactful it was to a friend a few years ago and went back to look at it, only the scene was nothing like I remembered it because my imagination had painted in all of the colour that Gemmell left out in favour of ruthlessly efficient prose.

So, that’s the confession out of the way, I am coming at this as a fan. The idea that somehow, a decade after his passing I might once again read a Gemmell novel for the first time was staggering to me, even if it was a second ‘Ross Harding’ book rather a new Gemmell fantasy.

BACKGROUND: In a FEAR interview in the early 90s Gemmell responded to a question from Stan Nicholls, asking what he was working on at the moment, with the line ‘I’m writing thrillers at the moment…’ and the plural of that word thrillers, not a thriller, has haunted me as a fan for years.

Obviously I was front of the queue to buy Ross Harding’s first novel, White Knight Black Swan, when it was published by Arrow, and I’d been looking at an entry on Amazon for a second Ross Harding novel, The Rhyming Rings, also to be published by Arrow (it even has a ten digit and thirteen digit ISBN assigned to it, ISBN-10: 009958350X, ISBN-13: 978-0099583509) that never appeared and which I assumed was ‘it’, the reason for the extra s in the word thrillers.

Gemmell himself gave some wonderful interviews in old magazines, and never shied away from saying what he was working on or what was already in the bag. There were a lot of tantalising names out there, titles of books that never appeared. Indeed, in GM magazine he references The Lost Crown, a children’s fantasy novel written with his daughter Kate’s help, which was for Great Ormond Street hospital when it looked like they were losing the rights to Peter Pan (a fantasy adventure about Luke who wakes in a strange forest to find himself surrounded by wolves. He is rescued by Capricorn, a child warlock, and a conceited owl who tell him he is trapped in the world of Nightmare and can only escape if he performs an act of great bravery) which is now itself lost. There’s also The Hawk, an early fantasy novel that predates Legend by a decade and more (the original manuscript is currently on eBay with a certificate of authentication for the uber fan); Caswallan; Devilblade; The Chaos Warrior (which is the original version of Druss the Legend, the first chapter of which appeared as a short story Dawn of a Legend); an Arthurian novel by the name of King Beyond the Gate (which is probably Ghost King or Lost Sword of Power, though it bears the name of his second published novel); and the crime novels Rhyming Rings, and through a conversation with a friend of Gemmell’s last year, a sequel to White Knight Black Swan which he read in manuscript format, and as per Gemmell’s request destroyed, both of which were assumed to be lost. Will the latter appear one day? I was really hopeful when the original announcement was made, but now I suspect the only extant copies of the manuscript that Gemmell sent to a few select friends were destroyed and given the timing, even if there was a digital copy, it was almost certainly stored on 3.5” floppy disc, meaning more than twenty years later it would have degraded. It’s just the way of the world.

THE BOOK ITSELF: That Gollancz have unearthed one of these lost works is nothing short of incredible for a Gemmell fan like me. I was torn between wanting to dive right in and tear through it or savour it. The problem is Gemmell’s writing is compelling. The power of it lies in the fact that you can’t just dip in and out, you need to go on. You need to turn the page and promise yourself just one more chapter. Rhyming Rings is no different. The tale of a young journalist, Jeremy ‘Jem’ Miller and the hunt for an ambidextrous serial killer. Jeremy thinks of himself as a rising star, and to be honest is a bit of a dick in the early parts of the book. He’s under the illusion that he’s better than everyone else and is wasted covering so-called heart-warming stories about local interest – you know the kind of thing, the Sunday fete down at the village hall, the flower show and baking contest, the mainstays of the local papers of the late 80s and early 90s. He ends up talking to a local psychic who wants to help the police, but like every good reporter he thinks the whole thing’s bunkum until she starts saying things that land a bit close to home, and suggest that maybe just maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye.

This is where Gemmell’s background in fantasy comes in, I think, and we’re treated to a few wonderful moments of the supernatural that elevate Rhyming Rings above the realms of a straight crime novel, especially when the psychic is forced to experience the victims’ last moments first hand, her bond placing her right there at the death.

Obviously one of the reasons for the Ross Harding pseudonym when Gemmell wrote White Knight Black Swan and this one, was to avoid comparison to his fantasy novels, but in retrospect it’s hard to separate one from the other, despite on the surface being very different. But Gemmell was a writer of archetypes, and those same archetypes transfer from genre to genre. There are some familiar characters here, even if they’re dressed in more modern clothes. Jeremy puts me in mind of Rek, the broken hero of Legend, who starts out as a bit of a dick and slowly grows into the hero he needs to be. You’ve got Mister Sutcliffe who (despite the connotations of the name in a serial killer novel) bears a more than passing resemblance to the big man of Druss, Jaim, Pagan etc. There’s also familiar set pieces, the call back to the last stand of the Alamo and those heroic do or die impossible odds that stand as a trademark of pretty much every Gemmell novel (think Skeln Pass), and even in this setting, they work.

The difference, I think, lies in just how angry parts of Rhyming Rings are. It’s a book of its time – and part of me can’t help but wish it had seen the light of day in the early 90s when it was written – that serves as a time capsule to the late 80s where modern things like computers and mobile phones have forever changed crime novels, but which here when technology makes its appearance is almost arcane. There’s a real burning anger buried in some of the text about the societal collapse going on, the race relations in the housing estates of London, the lack of prospects and oppression of the poor and a real taste of poverty about parts of the book and this works, for me, as well now as it ever could have then because we’re seeing modern parallels at work on our streets today. You can tell this is something the writer really cares about. The danger is in some places that passion can become a bit didactic but I don’t think it steps over the line. Your mileage, as they say, may vary, if that wasn’t the 80s you grew up in.

What I see in Rhyming Rings is the career path not taken. There’s no doubt that his sparse prose and tight plotting would have worked well for a career crime novelist. Between White Knight Black Swan and this one we’ve got the template for an entirely different Gemmell to the one we know today. I can only imagine what might have come if he’d continued down this path, not suffered the poor sales of the hidden identity, and genuinely had the chance to flourish as a crime writer. I think he’d have come into his own and been right up there with many of those we consider the best of 90s, but in doing so we’d have lost the Rigante books and the Troy novels, and those two series stand as testament to just how good a fantasy writer Gemmell was. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

VERDICT: It’s hard to put a score on something like this. It’s way beyond a curio, for all the background and its status as a lost novel. It’s a solid crime story. It suffers from having sat on a shelf for twenty plus years whilst the genre moved on, so the actual mechanics of the killer and the reveal aren’t exactly groundbreaking or earth-shattering, but they don’t need to be. This is full of social commentary and anger at where our country is going. You can’t help but wonder how it would have been received in the early 90s when it was originally written. Well, I think. Jeremy’s journey from selfish prick to a hero finally willing to put others ahead of himself is as compelling as any Gemmell wrote in his early career; the incidental characters like Ethel, the psychic, and Mister Sutcliffe are more than just filler, they have genuine purpose and their own journeys; however, the next tier of characters – Don Bateman, the newspaper man, Sue Cater, the journalist originally given the hot serial killer case, and company – is considerably thinner than was the case in his fantasy novels of the same period, which leads me to think that this would probably have had one more draft before publication back then to flesh them out a little more.

What you don’t have in Rhyming Rings is a huge cast. It’s a tight novel, with an even tighter focus, the rings of the title being the wedding bands the psychic uses to establish her connection with the victims, but it’s stronger for that. As I said right at the outset, the chance to read something new from Gemmell wasn’t something I’d ever imagined would happen again, and while it isn’t one of his best, it’s far from his worst, and even a lesser Gemmell is still a rare treat.

Even if you’re not a crime reader there’s enough trademark Gemmell here to fire your heart, so, for me, this gets a very strong 8/10

Steven Savile

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