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Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep.
Going toe-to-toe with Raymond Chandler … Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Photograph: Allstar Collection/Cinetext/WARN/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Going toe-to-toe with Raymond Chandler … Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Photograph: Allstar Collection/Cinetext/WARN/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Muscle by Alan Trotter review – a new take on noir

This article is more than 5 years old
As with the best pulp fiction, there’s serious existential heft to this dazzling debut about a pair of toughs marauding around 50s America

All my friends loved Paul Auster’s New York trilogy when it came out in the mid-1980s. They recommended it to me, repeatedly. It was like American pulp fiction, they said, but also like French literary theory. I bought it. I tried reading it, repeatedly. I would get 40 pages into Auster’s parboiled prose about doppelgangsters looking for private dicks called Auster and then I would stop, and stopping would feel good.

I had been reading a completely different novel from my friends: this was probably my failure rather than theirs. And Auster wrote much better later on. (Or so the same friends tell me.)

With Muscle, the Scottish writer Alan Trotter has written the book my friends were recommending – or, at least, the one I thought they were recommending. It does what City of Glass promised to do: takes Raymond Chandler, Albert Camus, Philip K Dick and Patricia Highsmith and pummels them together into something not entirely new but exquisitely fresh.

Most of the book is narrated by Box, who is muscle for hire. He punches, stabs and burns his way through the novel, a couple of paces behind his partner-in-crime. This character’s name is never revealed, appearing only as “______”. The two of them maraud around a nameless city in a noir version of 1950s America, where men wear homburgs and are good at violence.

When a writer enters this literary territory, they are instantly going toe-to-toe with Raymond Chandler. You need strength, then technique, but you also need grace. The first part of the noir sentence is easy enough to pull off: it gets action done minimally but elegantly. It’s the set-up punch: “His moustache twitched …” Any writer can write that. But then you get to the pivotal word “like”. After this, you’re on your own. You have to deliver the follow-through. Trotter’s moustache-twitching sentence continues, “… like a car veering into oncoming traffic”. It’s balanced, light on its toes – a sweet punch. Chandler might win on points, but this fight could go the distance.

Muscle – Trotter’s debut novel – isn’t ring-ready from the opening bell. The first pages, which deal with another couple of remorseless killers called Hector and Charles, read as if a few hundred words of crime fiction have been pinged back and forth through Google Translate. But then Box takes over the story, and the one-twos start to come. “As we turned the tallest peak, the city seemed to tip out in front of me like dark paint down a glass hill.” That sneaky jab made me smile: yes, it’s another city of glass, but it’s not Auster’s. And here’s a sentence that really made me slap-happy: “The larger [man] had a nose that had been broken so many times it lay flat on his face like roadkill.”

Most of Muscle passed in a daze of pure reading pleasure. There are descriptions here that not only fit their emotional moment to perfection but seem to convey an action, a thing, as well as it’s ever been done. Here is a woman getting a light: “She reached toward me and picked my cigarette from my lips. She put its lit end to the unlit end of her own and inhaled, pulling the air back up the cigarette, through the flame – which growled and chewed into her cigarette – and then up through it, into herself.”

This is not in any believable way the language of a musclehead. But the main plot involves Box becoming friendly with and then profoundly influenced by Holcomb, a writer of Philip K Dick-esque pulp science fiction about time travel, parallel universes and existential devastation. Holcomb is also defined by the way he smokes. “He was the sort that holds a cigarette only in ways that don’t quite make sense, like they’ve over-thought the whole exercise and now worry it won’t be impressive enough just to hold a cigarette.” The final fifth of the book swerves unpredictably, but I’d say successfully, into a mind-meld of Box’s possible pasts and impossible futures.

As with the best pulp fiction, there’s serious existential heft here. The force of the melancholy can catch you off guard. “This is always the thing, this is the tide we cannot swim against – that we always have to find somewhere to be. You chew down the tiredness until it chokes you, you keep finding somewhere to be until you’re excused, finally.” Trotter is a very fine writer, and Muscle is an unadulterated ultraviolent delight.

Toby Litt’s Wrestliana is published by Galley Beggar. Muscle is published by Faber (£10). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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