Crime Writer Simon Kernick
Author of Relentless, Severed and Deadline
With his seventh book due to be released in paperback in the UK this summer, Kernick has become one of the most successful of the current crop of British crime writers.
Early Life and Career
Kernick was born in Slough, near London, in 1966. Like many other authors, he did not immediately embark upon a writing career but instead had a series of jobs which included labouring and fruit-picking before spending most of the 1990s in London as a computer software salesman.
Discontent with the way his career was going prompted Kernick to try his hand at writing crime fiction, and he produced two largely ignored works before completing his first major novel The Business of Dying in 2001. The book was sold to Transworld and appeared in July of 2002 to considerable acclaim and respectable sales figures.
The Business of Dying
The novel features DS Dennis Milne, a cynical cop who earns a little extra money on the side by working as a hitman; predictably enough a hit goes wrong and leads to trouble for Milne. He finds himself on the trail of the killer of an eighteen year old girl but must also avoid the spectre of his own crimes coming back to haunt him in a tense thriller which prompted no less a writer than Reginald Hill to call it “taut, gripping, disturbing – a most assured and original debut”.
Relentless
The next few years saw Kernick produce a further two books, including A Good Day to Die, a sequel to The Business of Dying and once again featuring DS Milne. It was his fourth novel, however, that would really catapult Kernick into the big league: 2006’s Relentless was picked as one of Richard and Judy’s Summer Reads when it was released in paperback in 2007, and the resulting increase in sales figures meant that Kernick was now a best-selling author.
Relentless tells the story of an ordinary man named Tom, whose world is turned upside-down one Saturday afternoon by a phone-call from best friend Jack, who appears to be running in terror from unknown assailants. With his last words, Jack utters Tom’s address, leaving Tom no choice but to take his children and run. The rest of his day gets no better, with further murders and the implication of his wife in one of these crimes.
The novel switches between first and third person, as we alternate between Tom’s view of events and the progress being made by the investigating police officers Mike Bolt and Mo Khan. This is a satisfyingly pacey thriller which prompted the Observer to pronounce it “unputdownable”.
Severed
Kernick’s most recent novel, Severed, appeared in paperback in 2008, and has been felt by many readers to be less satisfactory. This time the novel is all first person, seen through the eyes of ex-soldier Tyler, who wakes up one nightmarish morning in an unknown house with the headless corpse of his girlfriend besides him. It soon appears that someone is trying to set him up for her murder, in order that he should play a part in another crime, and this leads to a sequence of increasingly violent and bloody deaths.
The problem with this novel is not just the plot, which runs frantically from one grisly event to the next, but the central character, who comes across as a poor imitation of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. He is implausibly adept at getting out of tricky situations with a well-timed punch or two, and seems irresistible to all the women that he meets along the way.
New Novel: Deadline
Simon Kernick’s new novel Deadline is due out in July 2008: let’s hope it signals a return to the form of his earlier novels.
