Banks does not really develop the characters that surround Innes. We realise their chances are bleak and suspect they aspire to little besides money and booze. Fresh out of prison, Innes becomes a PI because he cannot think of anything else at which he could make a living. In contrast, Morris Tiernan, the typical gang boss, remains at the top of the heap because he is smarter than his lackeys. He offers Innes a job, and the PI is too frightened to turn him down. Then there is Tiernan’s twisted son, Mo, and his friends Baz and Rossie. Together they act like the Three Stooges. Detective Sergeant Donkin, who is too lazy to look for the real culprit, spends his time going after ex-con Innes. Banks has created all of these shallow figures to keep Innes from leaving their shady underworld.

With only characters like these, Banks would probably not be able to build a credible story, but Cal Innes is somehow different. He does not fit into the group. We first see the PI smashing a possible client’s face into a dirty toilet bowl and know Cal is an ex-con with his office attached to a pub, but he is more than that. He seems to have a genuine desire to go straight. He passes on Brenda’s request to kill her abusive husband and seriously tries to figure out how to turn down Morris Tiernan’s job without offending him. But circumstances force him to get out of town so he takes Tiernan’s job that sends him to Newcastle in search of Stokes, who has evidently stolen money from Tiernan.

Although the reader wants Innes to finish this job so he can get back to his struggle to leave Manchester’s lowlife behind, he has faults that make moving on difficult. He drinks too much, and perhaps, thinks and feels too much. Knowing not to trust Tiernan, he figures that Stokes is not as bad as Tiernan paints him. By delving into the mystery surrounding Stokes, he learns more, and in trying to examine the relationship between Stokes and Alison, Tiernan’s sixteen-year-old daughter who has run away with Stokes, Innes tries to become the knight that returns Alison to Tiernan. Unfortunately, they are thugs. No one is completely innocent and all are victims. Innes is beaten mercilessly for that error but he continues to make other mistakes. He uses Donna, an alcoholic he picks up in a bar, but then regrets it, meaning to go back to make sure she is okay. He beats up George, another lost cause, and trashes Rossie’s van in a fit of drunken rage, ending up in a Newcastle jail where he has the choice of going back to prison or remaining under Tiernan’s thumb.

Short on mystery and tall on undeveloped characters, ‘Saturday’s Child’ still draws us in. Perhaps it is Bank’s ability to write in short direct sentences with plenty of expletives that makes us think that we are watching a fast-moving action film. More likely, it is because the reader actually feels for Innes. While few of us live in that part of Manchester, the hell that Innes cannot seem to move out of, his weaknesses are ours. What would we do if we were in his shoes? We would probably make similar mistakes or wind up dead.

Coralie Hughes Jensen is a full-time professional writer and author of six novels. Two of her short stories received honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest 2000 Writing Competition, which attracted over 19,000 entries. Her book reviews have appeared regularly in Bibliophilos and her fiction in Bibliophilos, QWF, Vermeer and Nostalgia. She was interviewed by Rembrandt Publishing as an “up and coming” writer in 2005. She is author of six novels. A Canadian company epublished her novel, ‘Friends of the Earth’ and accepted her collection of stories, ‘Cape Ann Mysteries’. A local radio station interviewed her live for a non-fiction project involving the court system. She is currently speaking in front of book clubs and attending signings at bookstores in the States and in Canada for literary novel, ‘Passup Point’. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, Coralie has lived and worked in the Netherlands and trained employees in high tech systems in Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea. She has also lived in Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.