Burning BrightJay Russell
Raven Books (Robinson) paperback, 280 pages, £5.99
Review by David Clark (1997)
Burning Bright is Jay Russell’s now-usual mix of detective fiction and horror, much in the manner of his previous Celestial Dogs (hardboiled bad craziness and Japanese mythology in LA) and Blood (a police procedural with designer drugs and gang warfare, also set in LA). The wackiness this time features funny business in the East End of London (particularly around ever-fashionable Spitalfields) and old England generally, though liberties are taken with geography – this isn’t a serious work in the tradition of Sinclair and Ackroyd, just Russell’s latest modern pulp novel.
Burning Bright's protagonist is Russell’s detective from Celestial Dogs, former sitcom and porn actor Marty Burns (Burning Bright is his new show on Fox, there’s no apparent link with William Blake). Burns goes on the Jack the Ripper trail (for TV purposes), is dogged by neo-Nazis, and encounters Oswald Mosley’s ghost, Hindu mysticism, and voodoo in Liverpool. Some Arthurian stuff involving travellers in Cornwall is thrown in along with, well, more; it’s just one thing after another, with the good guys chasing around England out of the need to beat the bad guys at various crazy occult rituals.
Aided by Russell’s sharp dialogue, Burning Bright fairly speeds along. I do wish, though, that novelists would stop using neo-Nazis for cheap entertainment. There’s no hard evidence that the Nazis were serious occultists, and in Burning Bright you can’t really believe in them. That caveat aside, this is a highly successful piece of generically-mixed contemporary pulp fiction. •