The Contractor by Raymond Davis

If you’re as obsessed with foreign affairs, the continuing wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the “war on terror” more generally as I am, then you might just remember the name Raymond Davis. In January 2011, he was involved in a shootout on the streets of Lahore which left two Pakistani men dead in the road. A contractor with the US embassy, his car was soon surrounded by a mob and he summoned help. A 4x4 driven by two other contractors on the way to rescue him collided with a motorcyclist, leaving another Pakistani dead. The 4x4 withdrew and Davis was arrested. The result? A diplomatic crisis with Davis held in a Pakistani prison for almost three months.

There has been a lot written about Raymond Davis in the years since. As well as various newspaper articles, he features in two well-received books written by highly respected journalists: The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazetti, and Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill. Both these titles examine the CIA and Pentagon’s involvement in paramilitary action post 9-11. The consensus in all this work – the articles, the books - is that Davis was a CIA paramilitary officer, either directly employed by the CIA, or via a Private Military Corporation, and that his role was either intelligence gathering, or perhaps, the targeting of militants for assassination.

Davis rejects those assertions in The Contractor, claiming that he was employed simply as a bodyguard, a personal protection officer for diplomats and US State Department officials. In fact, he expresses great anger at the allegations made in the US press, saying that while he can understand the Pakistani media repeating such fabrications, the US media’s willingness to repeat them without any evidence while he was still in detention endangered his life.

Unfortunately, Davis does little to rebut the picture painted of him so far, as The Contractor focuses almost entirely on his time in detention. With a sub-heading that reads: “How I landed in a Pakistani prison and ignited a diplomatic crisis”, this perhaps should not have come as a surprise. But, I thought and hoped that there might be some context. Don’t get me wrong, The Contractor is a good book; it’s well written and gives a good insight into both the conditions he was held in and what it’s like to find oneself suddenly helpless, at the mercy of a foreign judicial system, at the centre of diplomatic and media storms.

But I couldn’t help but find myself intrigued by the few hints he did give as to his life before. For example, he tells the story of how he was on Hamid Karzai’s protection detail when they rolled into the compound of an Afghan warlord only to find themselves in a Mexican standoff with the Warlord’s men. It’s a great anecdote and made me wonder what other tales he has to tell. Perhaps Davis is holding them back for another book? If so, great, I will read that also. The problem is that until that is published, there is so little in The Contractor about what he was doing in Pakistan on the fateful day of the shootout that led to his gaoling, that it is inevitable the vacuum will be filled with speculation. Perhaps baseless speculation, but speculation nonetheless.

4 out of 5 stars 

Q&A with David Videcette

Where did you get the idea behind The Detriment?

 The Detriment deals with real life cases, things that really happened. So it’s not so much where I got the idea from, but more - how fictional is the tale that I have told, and why I’ve decided to tell it? 

One of the issues that I deal with in The Detriment is about keeping secrets, about what happens when you’ve previously agreed or decided to keep something secret, and then you either can’t or won’t any further, and the secret or secrets are exposed to the world for all to scrutinise. I guess this is a question that I wrestle with myself all of the time, and why it is at the heart of my book.

Should the public be kept in the dark so much with regard to the inner workings of government and their security?

 

The book deals with conspiracies. Obviously, some conspiracies occur, but equally there are also lots of groundless conspiracy theories out there. As someone who has investigated such things through your work, how would you advise people tell the difference?

It’s often very difficult, especially in today’s non-stop news environment, to decipher the groundless from something that has substance. My main piece of advice is never believe anything that is reported anonymously. If the source is ‘unnamed security or intelligence officials’ – treat it as possibly made up. And even if it’s not made up, even if it has come from an intelligence database, it’s very, very easy to falsify intelligence and make it look like it’s a fact. Evidence is very different from intelligence, which is a theme in my book too.

A strapline you use is, ‘I can’t tell you the truth, but I can tell you a story…’ Reading the book and knowing that it is at least in part based on your own experiences, how true are the conspiracies swirling around in the book? Are they completely fictional?

I like to write from direct experience. I’m a firm believer in the saying, ‘know what you write, and write what you know’. The Official Secrets act forbids me from telling “the truth”, but it cannot interfere with my artistic rights as a writer. So all the time that something is “fiction”, it can never be construed as the “the truth”. Hence ‘I can’t tell you the truth, but I can tell you a story…’

I leave it up to the reader to decide how much is real and how much is fiction.

Some secrets are a crime to tell, while others are a crime not to tell – it’s the moral dilemma at the heart of many of my stories and often my life itself.

There are very few people that know what elements of my stories are fact, and which are fiction. Much of the time, I am the only one who knows. It’s best that way.

How do you get your ideas? What’s the process and how do they go from vague inspiration to fully fleshed-out notions?

The events that I write about are true to life, and are just waiting out there to be turned into ‘a story.’ The inspiration for me to do that often comes from something that I see as unjust, or I see as something that people should know about. So that’s when I draw upon my experience to ‘re-tell’ something as fiction; it’s my way of shaping the future by not forgetting the past.

Other than your own experiences, tell me about the research that goes into your writing?

I am constantly reading or researching something. Very often I will start with something that I need to prove as fact, before I can write about it on a fictional basis – it’s an odd and extremely frustrating process sometimes.

Tell me about your writing, do you write full time?

I have a jam-packed life. As well as the books, I also work as a consultant in the personal security sector for high-net-worth individuals. I write and commentate for various news and media outlets both at home and internationally - and I have two teenage daughters that think I’m their personal chauffeur. In amongst all of that, I fit my writing in!

When is your most productive period of the day?

In terms of word count, I’d say it was the middle of the night…

The Detriment, like the Theseus Paradox that came before, is a brilliant thriller. I note that your main character is also an anti-terror detective. Is any part of it biographical?

Let’s put it this way, if I were an actor, I’d say to you - ‘I do all my own stunts.’

I know you’re working on a third title in the series. Can you tell us anything about that?

We see Jake in a different environment, working abroad, which is something I also did during my career as a counter-terror detective.  

What other writing projects are you working on?

I have another project in pipeline based on an unsolved real-life murder. I’m currently in discussions with various different parties about it. It may turn into a factual book, a TV documentary, or I may have to ‘fictionalise’ it.  

Finally, I’m going to shamelessly poach two questions the author Mark Hill (author of The Two O’Clock Boy) used to put to writers on his blog. Like me, Mark was a book blogger before a successful author and I like to think that the answers to these questions helped him glean valuable help for his own writing. Certainly, reading them on his blog is helping me. So here goes:

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

That it takes more motivation than I ever could have imagined to see a project through from start to finish.  And that it’s not always about literary prowess, but a lot about how you package your work succinctly, and communicate it appealingly to readers.

Give me some advice about writing?

Keep the plot and writing as simple as possible. Less really is more in most cases. 

Find out more:

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Check out David’s books:

The Theseus Paradox is available to buy on Kindle or in paperback at Amazon.

The Detriment is out now and can be ordered on Kindle or in paperback.

For free worldwide delivery, check out all David’s books at The Book Depository.

The Detriment by David Videcette

This is the second novel of the author’s and once again we’re with Detective Inspector Jake Flannagan of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. The author, David Videcette, is himself a former police officer who spent much of his career in anti-terror; as with his first novel, The Theseus Paradox, The Detriment sticks very closely to real life.

There are quite a few former police officers writing crime fiction and thrillers these days, but where David has carved out a niche for himself is through fictionalising real-life past investigations, cases he came across while working on the Counter Terror Command. Whereas David’s first novel tackled the 7/7 bombings, The Detriment deals with the attempted bombing of the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London and the Glasgow Airport bombing, both of which occurred in the space of a short time in 2007.

David’s first novel, The Theseus Protocol, was a brilliant thriller. Apart from being well-written, it had at its core one of the most traumatic events of recent British history, the horrific bombings of 7^th July 2005. This gave the book a compelling narrative drive that pulled the reader in. Due to this, when I began reading The Detriment, I was a little concerned to find the focus on a relatively minor event (I accept of course that these bombings were only “minor” in the sense that they were botched and injuries were minimal). I couldn’t help but wonder whether the author was suffering from the well-known writing dilemma of “second book syndrome”. This is when an author achieves such success with their first novel, that expectations for their second are impossible to match, and through no fault of their own they fail to deliver.

I needn’t have worried, for The Detriment soon delivers the goods. In fact, I would argue that The Detriment is a stronger novel than the author’s first. This I think, ironically enough, is due to the factor I identify above and which had me concerned in the first place. The 7/7 bombings were such a major event that the author’s first novel naturally enough focused in its entirety on the event. The Detriment on the other hand, through dealing with a comparatively less serious event (once again, if the bombings had been successful, they might have equalled 7/7) allows the author to have his protagonist branch out and explore a whole plethora of issues. The Detriment quickly proves to be a labyrinthine conspiracy thriller, with Jake having to deal with Islamic Fundamentalism, Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, the international arms trade and espionage. If this all sounds confusing, it’s not, rather the book is incredibly well-plotted and at no point does the author get lost in the intricacies of it all.

As with any author who writes so closely from what they know, there are lots of minor aspects to the novel that ring with authenticity and are incredibly illuminating. One such aspect I most enjoyed with The Detriment was relationship between the Met’s Counter Terror Command and the UK’s intelligence agencies – the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, better known as MI6). The relationship, the author shows, is characterised by so-called Chinese Walls. Information is not shared freely, instead Jake must book an appointment, ask specific questions (the intelligence officers only answering what they are actually asked and nothing more), basically, he has to almost beg for the relevant information. One might ask why the lessons from 9/11 haven’t been learnt (the official 9/11 commission report identified the lack of communication between the CIA, the FBI, and other US agencies as a major factor for failing to prevent the attacks) and Jake’s frustration at this state of affairs is vividly portrayed by the author.

The best aspect of The Detriment however is a more broader affair. As a former current affairs journalist who worked across a plethora of programmes (Channel 4’s Dispatches, various BBC programmes) I’m used to coming across conspiracy theories. Every other day someone would contact our offices with some outlandish theory as to who or what was behind some event of global import. Most of these people were obviously loons – anti-Semites who laid everything at the door of the Jews, the tinfoil hat brigade who believed aliens or shape-shifting lizards stalked the corridors of power. Some theories however were more plausible. Saudi Arabia really has spent years funding a virulently anti-western strand of Islam; the British Government and British Aerospace (Bae) really were involved in a massive and murky arms deal, the effects of which are still being felt today; foreign powers really do assassinate people in our capital city, as amply demonstrated in the Litvinenko affair. By delving into some of this, the author has the reader reassess recent history, wonder just what is true, question whether one has dismissed things too easily.

In conclusion, The Detriment is a brilliant conspiracy thriller. It really is an excellent read and I can’t recommend it enough.

5 out of 5 Stars

A Dark So Deadly by Stuart MacBride

A Dark So Deadly is a standalone novel by the successful Scottish crime writer, Stuart MacBride. I suspect that it will prove to be the start of a new series. The basic premise is that there’s this department, unofficially titled The Misfit Mob, where disgraced police officers are dumped. They’re given crap cases and generally it’s hoped they’ll go away, perhaps resign through boredom and frustration. One day they happen across a murder and due to the rest of the force being overstretched they’re allowed to get on with it.

I’m a massive fan of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy novels. The premise is similar: a department of MI5 where disgraced intelligence officers are put out to fallow, given crap jobs in the hope they’ll go away. Herron’s novels are brilliant, so given that A Dark So Deadly had a similar premise, I thought I would give it a go. That said, I did have my doubts. Stuart MacBride is one of Scotland’s most successful crime writers and as such I know of his work. He generally writes serial killer thrillers and that’s a sub-genre I’m not a fan.

The first thing to say about this book is that the author can certainly write. That’s not a surprise, considering his pedigree, but he really can write very well. This is important because A Dark So Deadly is a long novel, coming in at a whopping 609 pages. This brings me to my first criticism, the novel is simply too long. I wonder if MacBride has reached that stage of his career that some successful novelist’s reach, where they can literally write what they want, where there’s no one at the publishing house anymore who can reign them in. Stephen King springs to mind as a good example of this. To my mind, some of King’s novels are far too long and reading them I’ve wondered whether earlier on in his career an editor might have trimmed the manuscript down, made it a better novel as a consequence. A Dark So Deadly is like that, the story could easily have been told in less words. In fact, a couple of times I almost put the book down. I didn’t because the writing is so good and MacBride always managed to pull me back in. Even so, I think it’s never good when a reader feels the narrative start to drag.

Despite the dark themes covered in the novel (more of this in a minute) MacBride injects a good dose of humour into the narrative. In fact, at points it’s almost a dark comedy. This again is reminiscent of the Mick Herron spy novels I referred to. As with the Herron novels, the humour in A Dark So Deadly helped me warm to MacBride’s Misfit Mob and the characters he draws are certainly memorable. I would like to say that I would like to spend time with the Misfit Mob again, that I look forward to the next novel in the series, but I can’t. That’s because of my second criticism.

I understand that I’m in a minority of crime fiction readers here, but I just can’t stand serial killer fiction. To my mind it’s just so tired, unimaginative and clichéd. It doesn’t help that having studied Criminology at university, and with various friends in the police, I know serial killers to be extremely rare. And those that do exist don’t generally kill people in the ludicrously fiendish ways that they do in film and books. In A Dark So Deadly the serial killer does just that, slaughtering his victims in a grisly way. While there have been a few serial killers like this – Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein - the majority have just dispatched their victims in not so dramatic a fashion. This insistence by writers of serial killer fiction to come up with ever more devilish a manner of dispatching their victims has always struck me as not a little prurient and exacerbates my dislike of these novels.

Of course, a valid criticism of this review might be that I knew what type of novel MacBride writes, that lots of people like it, that no one forced me to read A Dark So Deadly. And such criticism would be perfectly legitimate. In my defence, I wouldn’t have chosen to read the book had the premise of the Misfit Mob not sounded so intriguing. Basically, despite knowing that MacBride tends to write serial killer fiction, I was hoping for something different and was disappointed when that’s what I got. But just to be clear, I know many people reading this review won’t share these thoughts. In fact, it might be the case that someone reading this review will be attracted to the book, thinking that they like serial killer thrillers and thus why not give it a go. And I’m fine with that. It’s just personally, I would have preferred the author try something else.

So, in conclusion there’s lots to like about this book. It’s well written, it has a good touch of humour, the characters are well drawn. While what didn’t work for me – the length of the novel, the fact that it’s yet another serial killer thriller - may well be to other’s taste.

3 out of 5 stars