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Synopsis
Four days after Nick Harman was seven, his father climbed onto a bridge high above four lanes of traffic, paused, then threw himself on the road below. That was over nine years ago. Today Nick was sixteen. The clock alongside his bed read 7:59. Nick lives on a tough estate in north London. On his sixteenth birthday, his mother gives him a box left to him all those years ago. The contents lead Nick to discover what took his father from being a successful blues singer to taking his own life. Against a background of shifting allegiances, involving the violent gangs on the estate and his first serious involvement with a girl, Nick is forced to come to terms, not only with whom his father was but who he is himself. ‘A fine novel about growing up by one of the masters of British crime fiction’ — Le Monde John Harvey is the winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing. His latest adult novel is Cold in Hand, the latest in his long series of Resnick novels. Nick’s Blues is John Harvey’s first young adult book for twenty years – the opening title of Francois Guerif’s young adult crime fiction programme.
"John Harvey is a prolific, award-winning and popular crime novelist, well-known for the Charlie Resnick series of novels and more recent novels featuring an ex-cop called Frank Elder...It does a lot of different things very well. First, it's a mystery. For his sixteenth birthday, Nick gets a box full of stuff left by his dad, who killed himself when Nick was only seven. The boy lives with his mother on a tough estate, so part of the novel brings life in such a place vividly before our eyes. The third strand is Nick's own story, in which he has to deal with bullies, violence in various forms and also work out who he is and what he's going to become. He does this by trying to understand his father's suicide.Charlene, who used to sing with Nick's dad's band, gives him a guitar and the hope of playing it. Melanie, the overweight young woman who's one of his neighbours, has a tragedy of her own to deal with, and various schoolfriends, teachers, and shopkeepers also play a part in the drama. It's a very short book but packs a both an exciting plot and a great deal of emotion into its pages. There is, you should know, a single use of a four-letter word which is shocking, but then it's meant to be exactly that. This is one to try on boys who think they don't like reading."
Adele Geras
Overall I was disappointed with the story because it had such a promising start. The promised exploration of a young man's views about his father's life and suicide was interesting and potentially heart-wrenching. Sadly, it did not deliver. This weighty subject was only covered superficially because so many other weighty stories were introduced all vying for attention. The end result was little time and space to fully explore any of the stories leaving you feeling unsatisfied.
Liz Coward
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