Feature: Books - The Hollow Man. By Oliver Harris
Published: 19 May, 2011
by PIERS PLOWRIGHT
SUICIDE in the Bishops Avenue, assassination in South End Green’s Starbucks, terror and double dealing in the City, and a plot that twists and turns like the back streets of Kentish Town: this is a cracker of a debut thriller by local boy Oliver Harris.
At the centre of the labyrinth is Detective Constable Nick Belsey, down on his luck and high on intuition as his desire to disappear to some nice tropical island struggles with a very nasty case of a missing person.
It all begins in that home to sheikhs, princes and tycoons, running broad and gated for a kilometre down from the Heath (pictured) to a dismal stretch of the A1 and across the main road to East Finchley. In other words, the Bishops Avenue, London N2.
Harris catches beautifully the vulgarity and soullessness of London’s near-most expensive road after a character called Alex or Alexei Devereux appears to go missing from one of its mansions, leaving a suicide note. Belsey is drawn into an ever-darker search that will take us into boozers and banks, penthouses and prostitution rackets, ritzy restaurants and roughhouses.
Harris chooses an intriguing epigraph for his novel, taken from a poem by Hugo Williams: God give me strength to lead a double life. And that’s just what Belsey has to do to avoid being cornered by the crooks and the police who are both on his trail for different reasons.
Luckily for him, heavy drinking and a capacity for walking into trouble are matched by the sharpest of eyes and ears and the best set of reflexes this side of Clint Eastwood. He’s a thinker too, and phrases from The Golden Bough and the Bible float in and out of his head, giving the violence and the action a kind of reflective cover for detective and reader both.
People who know Hampstead, Highgate, Finchley, Camden and Kentish towns, and the back alleys of the City, will have a field day following Belsey up and down and around their manors so sharply picked out by Harris’s prose: “Into the back streets of Hampstead, where the world seemed gemmed and out of an advert; the houses themselves fat jewels with rustic tables behind basement windows...East Finchley. The tanning salons and charity shops were waking up.”
I wasn’t always sure, on that escalating journey, that Belsey’s reasons for hanging in there were totally convincing. But this is addictive stuff: those leafy lanes will never look the same again and I have a feeling Belsey will be back.
• The Hollow Man. By Oliver Harris. Jonathan Cape, £12.99