A Not-So-Accidental Hit

Last summer, you may recall, I was very excited about the release of pseudonymous journalist Tom Cain’s thrilling debut novel, The Accident Man, and wrote about it in The Rap Sheet when that book first reached British shelves:

The Accident Man is slicker than an oil spill. It attracts with its sensual women, dark villains, and the well-choreographed cutting back and forth between action sequences. But the novel also boasts an obvious understanding of and feeling for humanity, for people trapped by the bonds of economics and the relentless influence of human nature. Cain’s novel harks back, too, to the conventions of the “Golden Age of Thrillers,” and I just loved the fight and flight across Europe, Ian Fleming-style, with a balance of the high life and the recognition of death lying just a trigger-pull away.

Now, as Cain’s novel finally finds its way into U.S. bookstores, Clayton Moore of Bookslut seems equally stunned by its ambition:

I had a hard time believing anyone could fictionalize the death of Princess Diana in a tasteful manner. I’m not exactly a royal follower, mind you, but I’ve met Princes William and Harry as well as their distinguished father on a couple of occasions in my travels. William is enormously tall and carries the same graceful bashfulness you can see in photographs of his mother. When a working-class British mother told the young master of her pride in him, he blushed with Diana’s same red-faced charisma and his thanks was entirely genuine. For all of the blustering ridicule pointed at Charles by his countrymen, he’s very articulate and considerate in person and communicates the quiet character of an artist or a caretaker rather than the bravado of a future king. Despite my own hard-earned cynicism, it’s hard to dismiss as a caricature a man who has what it takes to shake hands with genuine warmth and meet you eye to eye.

Hell, even the author of The Accident Man wasn’t real, although it’s virtually impossible to stay hidden in the age of Google. Sarah Weinman and other determined sleuths quickly made a liaison between anonymous death-dealer Cain and a smart and worldly British journalist on the eve of publishing his first novel.

Click here to read Moore’s full write-up, plus a generous interview with the author himself.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)