SATURDAY’S CHILD
Polygon 2006
Harcourt 2008
It’s criminal up north.
Cal Innes is fresh out of Strangeways and ducking past muddied with ties to local gang lord “Uncle” Morris Tiernan. But when Tiernan finds out Innes is working as an unlicensed PI and calls in a favour Innes doesn’t owe, Innes is thrust into a cat-and-mouse game with Tiernan’s psychotic son, Mo. Ordered to track down a rogue casino dealer who’s absconded with a hefty chunk of cash, Innes finds the case pointing north to Newcastle. With Tiernan’s son on his tail and a Manchester cop determined to put the PI back on the spurs, Saturday’s Child has to work hard to keep living.
Praise for Saturday’s Child
“This is a two-fisted read, full of blood, beatings, and hangovers. But Banks shows a deft touch with humor—Mo’s attempts to prove himself a hard man provoke wincing laughter—and Cal’s ongoing fight with fear makes him our new favorite tour guide through Britain’s track-suited ‘chav’ or ’scally’ culture.”
- Booklist (Starred Review)
“Banks (The Big Blind, 2004) has an ear for the vernacular as sharp as, but a shade or two bluer than, that of George V. Higgins. Let the squeamish stick with Tony Soprano; this is real tough stuff.”
- Kirkus
“Tough and assured . . . Banks is updating the noir novel with an utterly original sensibility.”
- Publisher’s Weekly
“Bleakly, desperately funny, Ray Banks offers us a glimpse of what Samuel Beckett might have read like had he turned his hand to crime fiction.”
- Crime Always Pays (Declan Burke)
“Ray Banks’s writing is a dark delight, and Saturday’s Child is like blunt surgery from a cricket bat. Fast, hard, packed with madcap violence and twisted humor, it’s a bone-jarring ride through England’s bleak underbelly.”
- Patrick Quinlan, author of Smoked
“Ray Banks mixes sharp humor with crackling dialogue in a wild ride across the pond. Saturday’s Child is a page turner, start to finish.”
- Charlie Stella, author of Mafiya and Cheapskates
“Fast, funny, and hard as nails, Saturday’s Child proves to America what the UK already knows: There’s a heart in the darkness of today’s finest crime fiction, and Ray Banks will take you there. Buckle up.”
- Sean Doolittle, Barry award snatcher for The Cleanup
“Saturday’s Child has to be one of the finest PI novels of the year. With crisp, seamless prose and laugh-out-loud observations, Banks gives us a whole new spin on the classic detective novel. Ray Banks and his hard-edged, cynical PI Cal Innes are true originals. Read Saturday’s Child and you’ll realize that the future of U.K. detective fiction is Ray Banks.”
- Jason Starr, author of The Follower
“A savage hardboiled spanking, Saturday’s Child will leave you begging for more. Banks is a talented storyteller and a gifted wordsmith. He’s also demented in the best possible way. Keep sending the creamy goodness across the pond, Mr Banks. We want more!”
- Victor Gischler, author of Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse
“Saturday’s Child is a knock-out, written with the kind of energy and passion that far too few writers can muster. Fresh and fierce, it raises the bar for hardboiled fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.”
- New York Times Bestseller Laura Lippman, author of What The Dead Know
“Saturday’s Child is fascinating, fresh and darkly funny. It will be an exotic entertainment for American readers of hard-boiled detective fiction.”
- Thomas Perry, author of Nightlife
“Banks wields language with a knifefighter’s precision, with much the same result. From the first words to the last, this book flashes brilliantly.”
- Don Winslow, The Power Of The Dog and The Winter of Frankie Machine.
“This second novel from Ray Banks has absolutely everything a crime fiction fan could ever wish for; gritty realism, superb descriptive prose, exhilarating tension and snappy, realistic dialogue that keep the pages rolling over… Cool, slick and smart, if you like your crime mean and dirty with an underlying, recognisable moral basis, then Ray Banks’ Saturday’s Child is the must read novel of the year.”
-Chris High, Tangled Web UK
“Saturday’s Child has the feel of a writer grabbing the material with both hands and keeping a tight grip on it from first page to last… For me, it was like three parts Mike Leigh, one part Sin City, with maybe a dash of Dead Man’s Shoes thrown in too.”
- Steve Mosby, 50/50 Killer
“Ray Banks drops us deep into a Manchester of gangs and drugs and brutality, of drinking and blood and vomit… With profanities and violence throughout, this hard-edged, hardboiled crime fiction is not for those with delicate sensibilities.”
-Lorien Kaye, The Age
“Grim humour flavours the violence in combination with the colourful Mancunian dialect, including a profusion of four-letter words. Ray Banks has constructed a tightly-woven plot with some surprises, along what proves to be an uncomfortable journey… Saturday’s Child is an opportunity for a vicarious visit to the unsavoury underworld of Britain’s industrial north, but it is ‘nowt’ for the fainthearted.”
- Ell Housden, The Brisbane Courier-Mail
“Brilliant book…a Get Carter for the 21st Century…a real page turner.”
- Keith Topping’s Book of the Month, June 2006, BBC Radio Newcastle
“Banks is part of the post-Rankin generation for whom hardboiled is not just a state of mind but a reality. Tough-guy colloquial prose and a pace fast enough to skin a rabbit, at the service of a tale of down-and-dirty realism: this is fiery stuff.”
- Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian
“The writing’s so urgent, so brutal, and just so obscenely real that it creates a whole new kind of ‘dark’ for a genre that’s become a trifle stagnated in recent years. Hence this is a book anyone who’s fallen out of love with the genre in these recent times, where the old quality has been severely lacking, simply needs to read.”
- Chris Pickering, Bookmunch
“What sets Ray Banks apart from everybody else is that whenever he takes a chance, and in Saturday’s Child he takes plenty, he comes up aces.”
- Tribe
“[Ray Banks] writes about the kinds of people and places that I like reading about (ie: losers and shit-holes), and does so without flinch or compromise. This is a full-on bollocks-out thriller without all the airbrushery that you normally get. And the entirety is embued with a noir as thick as two-day-old motorway espresso. Roll on more Ray Banks books. This country needs HIM.”
- Charlie Williams, The Mangel Trilogy
“Banks is a startlingly fresh voice and within two books he has left many other established writers far behind.”
- Crimespree Magazine
“…terrific, brooding and chilling prose”
-Tom Adair, The Scotsman
“Banks gives Cal a gut-punching, page-turning thriller to romp through… the plot twists are a welcome sock in the jaw for formulaic police potboiler. It seems that Callum Innes, PI, has arrived.”
- The First Post
“[Saturday's Child] delights in punishing its hero so egregiously that even Cervantes would blush at the narrative… quite possibly this is a joke.”
- David Annand, The Scotsman On Sunday
“…a fine example of energetic, visceral and compelling storytelling… This is properly thrilling stuff.”
- The Big Issue In Scotland
“…Banks has created the first truly credible [British PI]… If you want your worst fears about Blair’s Britain confirmed, and be hugely entertained in the process, this is for you. It’s bleak, dark and brutal, the urban landscape a Chavland theme park writ large and nasty where the rides and highs come from drugs, nicked motors and unlawful sex and when you stop you stop for good.”
- Martyn Waites, author of The Mercy Seat, The White Room and Born Under Punches
“With a fast-paced plot, interesting characters and a wonderfully British feel, this book is a fast and satisfying read.”
- I Love A Good Mystery
“Let’s make this official then: Saturday’s Child is not only an excellent book, but it manages to do something which is damn near impossible to pull off: keep straight two first-person POVs written in different tenses and completely different dialects. Wait for the cricket bat, but the real gems are the incredibly strong voice, Cal’s further descent into hell and how profoundly screwed up families can really be.”
- Sarah Weinman in her Idiosyncratic Pick Of The Week.
“There’s life in the British PI yet, and Cal Innes is proof of that life. Saturday’s Child is one of the best novels of 2006, and Ray Banks is now more than just a name to watch; with Saturday’s Child he’s become one of the best damn writers in the business.”
- Russel McLean, Crime Scene Scotland
“I got the same thrill reading Mo’s narrative as I did whenever Begbie stepped onto the page in Trainspotting.”
- Alan Bissett, author of Boyracers and The Incredible Adam Spark.
“Ray Banks steps up into the majors. This is already the best UK novel of the year and I’d love to read what tops it.”
- The ever-kind Ken Bruen.