Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 55

The Symon Myles Mysteries

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ously, it also allows for a more authentic depiction of a cultural context. Unlike the
purely imagined New York in The Big Black, Follett sets The Big Hit exclusively
in England. “In those early days,” he has acknowledged, “I didn’t do much re
search. Instead, I used backgrounds that I knew. Apples lives in London and knows
neighborhoods, like Wapping and Bethnal Green, that I had been to as a reporter”
(“early” 2). And Follett had been around the music scene much of his life, both as
an amateur blues musician and as a music reviewer for the South Wales Echo. As a
result, the book (at least in the initial sections and through the use of “backtracks”)
seems not so much about crime as about a time and place where “[t]he kids could
not get enough of the music of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Miracles, and the
other black Americans admired and copied by the English blues groups” (17).
Even the book’s title, which at first seems indebted to the thriller genre, ultimately
suggests a completely different orientation. Eventually, the reader learns that ‘the
big hit’ refers not to a gambler’s stake or to a gangster’s murder but to the obses
sive dream of record producers, musicians and agents for a cultural breakthrough.
In three additional “backtracks,” Follett creates portraits of other inter
esting denizens of the pop music scene—Charlie Royal, an offshore broadcaster;
Billy Quitonne, a band manager; and Adrian Thrace, a studio executive—and if at
times the novel reads like a string of short stories or feature articles on aspects of
the music subculture, the emphasis on character study and on social milieu sug
gests a further abandonment of the strict hard-boiled thriller form. Rather than
containing quickly rising action and tough-guy heroes, the first forty pages pass
without a single murder. Instead, the mystery in this opening section appears to be
the mystery of personality, with Carstairs becoming a kind of psychological inves
tigator, wondering what’s alienated Winston, “—drugs, a woman, a nervous break
down on the way—could be anything” (13), and with Winston similarly pondering
the enigma of who Carstairs is:
He was a cool cat, that Apples. Must be rich, with that car and
this business. And he was old, to be so interested in music. He
was always down at the Worried Man, groovin’ with the kids
and pulling the birds. Yet there was something withdrawn about
him, as if he didn’t want to let you too far into his life in case he
had to shoot you down one day. (21-22)
Switching back and forth between two fundamentally different points-of-view,
both in terms of the pronoun used and the outlook, could have resulted in consid
erable inconsistency of approach. Here, however, the alternation of first-person
narrative with third-person “backtrack” at first works to the text’s advantage. So
long as the book focuses on the alienation of two friends, these alternating points-