Blog Tour! - Kid To Killer - Blog Tour!

I have to admit to being a sucker for vigilante fiction. I grew up watching The Equaliser - the original Edward Woodward series, obviously, not the films with Denzel Washington - my dad letting me stay up as long as I had finished my homework. Similarly, what is the appeal of the Marvel Universe and superhero’s more broadly, if it isn’t to see the champion of the little guy, righting the wrongs that the bureaucratic and disinterested state has little interest in doing.

That said, I’m also aware of how troubling such fiction can be. Recently I reviewed Death Wish, the original novel by Brian Garfield and inspiration for the film franchise.  I was unimpressed by Garfield’s novel which in my mind, like the films they spawned, sum up all that’s problematic in this genre: simplistic answers to complex problems, a tendency to dehumanise - the villains tend to the one-dimensional, “scum” that “deserve” to be executed - disdain for the rule of law; quite frankly, vigilante fiction can tend towards photo-fascism.

So where does Kid To Killer fit into this broad milieu? Has it the subtlety of The Equaliser, which while on occasion drifting to simplistic violence, tended to steer clear of the baser elements of the genre, or is it closer to the Charles Bronson film franchise? Happily it’s the former, the author producing here a more complex tale. Kid To Killer tells the story of Paul McGraw a fifteen year old boy who takes it upon himself to clean Edinburgh of those who prey on the innocent. 

Kid To Killer is written in first person. Like the protagonist, the author was born in Edinburgh and is also called Paul, so I found this a little problematic. It was like reading a biography rather than a work of fiction. I’m not for a moment suggesting that the author is a vigilante killer, but I was left wondering what supporting elements of the story were taken from his own life. Of course, all authors incorporate their own experiences into their novels to some extent, how could they possibly not, but the way this novel was written made it noticeable and a little distracting.

A problem vigilante fiction has more broadly is explaining how the character comes to do the things he or she does (historically it’s been a he, though interestingly this is starting to change). With some like The Equaliser, some of the superhero franchises, the protagonist already has a past that explains this, but in many, such as Death Wish and Kid To Killer, they don’t. Even where the character does have a past, there transition still needs adequate explaining. A number of academic studies down the years have shown that even most soldiers hesitate to fire their weapon in combat; most famously Lt Col David Grossman (US Army, Ret) wrote in his seminal title, On Killing, that the majority of servicemen in World War 2 either did not fire, or fired to miss (based on his research, training was changed so that by the Vietnam War, 90% fired). The point of this is that a vigilante thriller, unless the hero has had such training or is a psychopath, has to adequately explain how and why they have overcome the natural resistance to killing. I have to say that I didn’t feel the author adequately got this across. I just wasn’t convinced the character had sufficient motivation and his background didn’t make him “hard” enough to carry it off.

To be clear, there’s much to like about this novel. It’s been edited nicely, containing none of the obvious grammatical errors that blight so many self-published titles (by all means not all, many self-published authors invest in an editor). All in all this was an enjoyable enough read and an interesting addition to the vigilante thriller canon.

3 out of 5 stars