The Straw Men - Book Review

The Straw Men is fundamentally a crime novel. Specifically it is of the sub-genre "serial killer", though this being Marshall it's far from the usual stereotype for such works. It's an intelligent, complex thriller where the plot becomes more twisted as the book continues. Marshall even manages to work in topics such as the evolution of socialisation, the architectural ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and global conspiracy!

At the heart of the novel is "The Upright Man", a serial killer who has been responsible for the abduction and murder of a number of teenage girls. Once they are dead, he sends their parents a gruesome present: a sweater with the girl's name embroidered on it using their own hair.

There are three threads to the story. The primary viewpoint is a first person account by an ex CIA agent. When his parents are killed in a motoring accident he returns to the family home for their funeral. Whilst there he discovers a hidden note from his father saying "We're not really dead". He enlists the help of a friend and together they attempt to work out what is going on and hence begin to learn about The Straw Men.

The second plot thread involves an FBI agent and a retired policeman who are trying to solve the case of the Upright Man. After a period of inactivity he has struck again and a young girl is missing - hopefully not yet dead. The Upright Man's victims are usually killed about a week or two after their abduction, thus giving the story a nice time lock. The ex-policeman has personal reasons for wanting to catch the killer: his own daughter was murdered by the Upright Man.

The final thread is, of course, the killer himself. For obvious reasons not too much information is given about him, most of this thread is seen from the terrified viewpoint of his latest teenage victim. Marshall does an excellent job of getting the reader in to her head as she slowly loses all hope of rescue.

All these threads are woven together to form a plot of epic proportions that keeps taking unexpected turns. It verges at times on the highly improbable yet never actually strains believability too far. About the one thing that doesn't come as a surprise is the identity of the Upright Man, this is telegraphed very early on. So the ending doesn't have much of a sting in the tail, however it is a satisfyingly dramatic resolution and avoids the trap of trying to be one hundred per cent "happy".

Given the subject this is as you'd expect a dark, nasty book. Yet despite that I laughed a lot. Marshall gives his characters some very funny lines in the first half of the book, and these serve to alleviate the tension. In the second half, as the story heats up, the humour disappears.

As a fan of Michael Marshall Smith's speculative fiction I wasn't sure what to expect from The Straw Men. It turns out to be a compelling read. Marshall is a superb story teller who can make you care for his characters whilst they undergo an obstacle course of plot twists. There's no guarantee that even the main characters will come out of the story alive.

I'll give the last word to Marshall himself. In an interview in The Third Alternative, he said:

"That's something else that the book is supposed to be about; a reminder that we're animals, and that much of what we do and how we behave can be more easily explained by remembering that, rather than pretending that we're a bunch of angels wandering amongst the beasts."