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by Adrian Markle

Review by Lee Horsley

Adrian Markle’s Bruise (Brindle & Glass, 2024) tells the extremely compelling, often heart-wrenching story of Jamie Stuart, a badly injured martial arts fighter who has had the dedication to succeed internationally, becoming a middleweight champion of the world.  The novel centres on Jamie’s post-injury return to the fishing village he grew up in, to a bleak sea that overwhelms him with “its vastness, its dark emptiness…the relentless sound of it.” Throughout the novel Markle powerfully evokes the sense of a once thriving place that now embodies only loss and despair:

“It seemed the only thing they’d hauled out of the water here lately had been his father’s body some months before, his flesh grey and yellow and wrapped in thin-blooded bruises, with lungs full of seawater and enough booze in his veins to kill a better man.”

We come to understand why the son didn’t return for his father’s funeral, the reasons all too apparent in the family life that has  made Jamie into his adult self. Bruise is both a coming of age and a return to home novel: the relationship between child and man is developed through interlocking time lines, Jamie’s homecoming alternating with chapters set in his boyhood.  As readers, we’re given a cumulative sense of the ways in which childhood patterns of behaviour, injuries and losses have, by his early 30s, made it near impossible to escape. 

Having spent his whole life fighting to survive, Jamie compulsively returns to memories of the early conflicts that haunt his life: the remorseless brutality of his father, the death of a younger brother in part because Jamie was himself unable to show fear and back down. His oldest fears grew from being taken to fight on the beach – “watching his father mark a wrestling ring in beach sand with his toe, and what inevitably happened when Jamie lost.”  It was an experience that gave him the grit and toughness that sustained him in his professional fights. At the same time, it ensured that, underneath even his most triumphant moments, there was a chasm of fear. 

From the time Jamie returns home, he veers between hoping he might be able to help others while at the same time feeling that “There wasn’t anything for him here, he knew now. No job at the hospital, no job at the bar, not even coaching kids in their stupid karate.”  As his despair deepens, his brother works to persuade him that the only chances left in town are at the seedy margins of low-level crime, and he comes perilously close to feeling that his brother’s life of small scale drug dealing may be his only path to survival.  

Bruise is a very impressive first novel, and Markle is right to avoid a resolution dominated by the dangers and high tensions of a crime narrative. It may instead be that Jamie has to reconcile himself to living without decisive moments of defeat or glory, accepting smaller steps towards rebuilding a life that might ultimately be redemptive. In a key scene, he teaches two young boys the most rudimentary skills of fighting along with the kind of resolution that has driven him in everything he’s accomplished: “you can get down on purpose  or I can put you down, but either way you got to get used to  fighting your way up from the dirt.” Five out of five stars on this brilliant debut from us: highly recommended!

by Steve Weddle

Review by Lee Horsley

Steve Weddle’s The County Line (2024) is a big-hearted, wholly engrossing tale of thievery, betrayal and murder in the early years of the Great Depression. In the summer of 1933, Cottonmouth Tomlin returns home to a small town in southwest Arkansas just over the Louisiana border, after adventuring first to New Orleans and then to Central America. Leaving for Honduras, he’d had “a change of clothes and hope in the future. He’d come back with just a change of clothes. Better clothes, it was true, but not by much.”

Cottonmouth has returned for his uncle’s funeral, having been left an outlaw camp, “a scattering of cabins and an impassable road,” with a reputation for unsavoury goings-on. It is a useful place to hide kidnap victims or small-time outlaws on the run. As Cottonmouth gradually realises, however, his dilapidated camp is also a place that more powerful crooks might scheme to make their own. The County Line gives us a wonderful gallery of affectionately created ne’er-do-wells struggling to get by, hoping, after a drink or two, that they might, if luck is with them, knock over a bank with their four guns and seven bullets. Higher up the social scale, there are the formidably respectable but even more criminally inclined old sisters, Henrietta and Abigail Rudd – more than a match for any of the men in the town. And, eyeing the deficiencies of this local criminal hierarchy, there is the wholly untrustworthy interloper, Martello, who owns clubs in neighbouring Louisiana and “runs the whole corner of the state” – a man to both emulate and fear. 

Caught between dangerous adversaries, Cottonmouth considers whether he could work with the well-heeled Martello, maybe welcome him as a guest and go over some ground rules with him: “That had been the plan, hadn’t it? Bring Martello in; bring in business.” But as he carries forward his underhanded schemes, Martello tells Cottonmouth, “Look around. This is my camp now. My men. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” For Martello, it isn’t “about the history of the place” but about the future of a place he intends to shape and control. For Cottonmouth, on the other hand, it is home. There is continuity and a sense of belonging imparted by land his family has owned for nearly a hundred years: “I’ll take family and community over Hessian soldiers any day”. 

The County Line is a lively, humorous and above all compassionate story of lives worn down by the grinding years of the Great Depression, and of the choices forced by desperation. As Cottonmouth ponders his direction in life, he reflects, “Head back home from Honduras, and the next thing you know, you’re running a kidnapping ring out of your family’s hunting camp. What a world, he thought. What a world. —“