Publisher Description

Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.

Notes

This fast and funny debut novel now hits the paperback shelves. The book's four central characters are a 28 year old ex-public schoolboy who can not bear the idea of settling down, Suzy the Black Widow, Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Together, with the addition of some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins, they have a plan; the plan is to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid... "A very comic and brilliant book" The Spectator.

Author Biography

James Hawes is the author of six novels, including White Powder, Green Light and Speak for England. He lives in Cardiff.

Review

"Confident and sassy, brilliant" Time Out "A very comic and brilliant book... James Hawes has adapted an enjoyable narrative poise of cynical idealism, both a loving and a loathing of modern Britain... A new novelist of prodigious talent" -- Tobias Jones Spectator "A White Merc With Fins is determined and surprisingly successful at transporting the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction and the caper plot of Reservoir Dogs to Shepherd's Bush... Fast, sexy, bristling with more neologisms than a Douglas Coupland novel" GQ "Fantastically well done... revitalizes his genre" Independent on Sunday "Brilliant fun" Q

Kirkus US Review

From first-time author Hawes, one of the most endearingly caustic - yet still deftly sincere - novels to come out of Britain since Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. It's been a while since the wildly self-conscious and cynical musings of that novel's narrator lit up literary London. Recent English tastes in fiction have tended toward reports of low-life travails smattered with references to American pop culture, and Hawes's debut is no exception: His sliding-from-the-middle class, twentyish slackers are marking time in the lower depths. The narrator, a 28-year-old former heroin-user living in a shed in his sister's backyard, has practically no means of achieving his drastically limited ambition to own a house with tall windows and a garden. So, while working a temp job that puts him inside a private bank, he naturally concocts a master plan to heist a cool million. And what a plan it is. Lacing together an unshaven femme fatale, a noble bruiser, and the IRA, among other ingredients, he calmly and deliberately turns to profitable crime. Meanwhile, what makes the book vastly more entertaining than the Coupland/Tarrentino clone it might have been is Hawes's strategy of having his narrator filter every nuance of the story through his hilarious personal perspective. Not surprisingly, the boy's a romantic at heart, and it soon becomes clear that he's really doing it all for girlfriend Suzy, a woman whose primary passion in life is driving with the wind in her hair. With running commentary along the way on everything from gay lifestyles to the Apocalypse to the glories of smoking, the bank job comes together, culminating in two conclusive chapters of wonderfully gleeful chaos. Hawes has leapt fight past the callow grousings of Self, Welsh, and Fischer into a comic league all his own. Good to the last drop. (Kirkus Reviews)

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