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A Simple Plan
Scott Smith
Corgi paperback, 412 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)

A Simple Plan, a simple premise: what would you do if you found four million dollars in non-sequential, used banknotes?

It's what brothers Hank and Jacob Mitchell, along with Jacob's friend Lou, find on their way to pay the annual New Year's Eve visit to their parent's graves - in a crashed plane in the woods, an eyeless corpse and a bag stuffed with the cash. Assuming no one knows the plane's missing, let alone the money, they elect to clam up and sit tight for six months to be on the safe side before divvying up.

Telling wives and girlfriends is surely a minor transgression, but once over the line it's too easy to stay there. Soon honour amongst thieves means less and less - the brothers end up killing a neighbour who almost stumbles upon the crash site; Lou starts making demands for loans, backed-up by his knowing a little too much about the murder, and the stage is set for a falling-out, big style.

The best thing about Smith's novel is its sheer simplicity. Everything that happens grows out of that initial discovery, giving the book a crazy, twisted internal logic. A Simple Plan is a suspense novel, and on that level it works like a dream, hooking the reader inside the first few pages and then playing them on the line. This is crime and punishment stuff, and with this particular crime comes a very heavy punishment.

Remarkably proficient for a first-time novelist, Smith only comes unstuck twice. The initial murder, while vital to the progression of events thereafter, is too easily enacted - Jacob beats the man, but it's his brother Hank who has no apparent difficulty in finishing the job, choking him to death. An underachieving thirty-something with a pregnant wife, Hank's metamorphosis from Nice Guy narrator to cold-blooded killer doesn't convince, even though Smith desperately shovels on the frustrations of small town life.

The majority of the mayhem is reserved for two long sequences of the most appalling Grand Guignol. Here Smith's tongue surely cannot be too far from his cheek as scenes trip from threat and apprehension into what's essentially an elaborate gore-soaked farce, a kind of exaggerated blackly comic lunacy that Hitchcock might have recognised.

Thankfully, despite A Simple Plan's brutal spiral of violence and mistrust, Smith manages to claw his way out to a low-key but eminently satisfying climax. And while A Simple Plan is hardly great art, like the best of Jonathan Kellerman's novels it's possessed of an enviable page-turning ferocity which not only proves that crime doesn't pay, but that it can get very very messy. •

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