Guy N. Smith - Blood Circuit

[dem bones]

Guy N. Smith - Blood Circuit (New English Library, 1983)

Blurb:
The woman was beautiful, inviting, rich. And had a proposition for him.
She had handled her Alfa Romeo with a decisive skill that, as an ex-racing driver, he found impressive. She was clearly interested in him. Very very interested.
Away from the Grand Prix circus, divorced, her sudden arrival at his lonely cottage excited and disturbed him.
Disturbed him because what she was asking went against all his recent vows. He knew that he dared not return to the race track. Not when nightmares of his last drive still visited him.
But she did need him. That she made clear. In spite of the strange history of violence and sudden death that clung to her, he felt himself responding to her. And felt a chill fear for the future seep into his bones ...


A GNS sport is horror entry! Grand Prix race ace Mark Slade, last year's runner up at the International Race of Champions in Daytona, retires on the eve of the Riverside trials leaving his sponsor, Seamark Cruises, furious. Slade's explanation is that the sport has cost him his marriage to Yvonne, but the truth is his nerve has gone. No amount of pleading or threats from Stern, the team manager, will change his mind. He goes to ground up North to gaze wistfully at honest farmers toiling in the fields, munch biscuits and consider his future. ("Slade decided that these custard creams had a bitter tang about them.") damn, but he misses his wife.

Rich heiress Lee Hammerton, twenty-five, effortlessly locates him. Lee has entered a car for the next IROC and needs a driver capable of winning. Her late father, Craig, and old man Seamark were embroiled in a bitter feud right up until Dad's horrific death (fortunately, she hated him). Ruthlessly ambitious, Lee will do anything to lift that trophy for Hammerton. Slade listens to what she has to say out of politeness to her small but perfectly formed breasts. It really has been a while since he last had sex. But he won't get back behind the wheel of a formula one car, no way.

Lee, conceding defeat for the time being, offers him alternative employment at her Hertfordshire circuit. Since entering the competition, she's received regular hate mail from an anonymous source. She suspects Seamark. Slade agrees to troubleshoot on her behalf. This comes as a relief to Lee who believes that she is marked for death.

"Have you ever heard of .... of the Hammerton curse? It's nothing to joke about .... My ancestor, Jasper Hammerton was accidentally beheaded by a careless farmworker with a sythe. His son was killed shortly afterwards in a riding accident. Edwina, Jasper's daughter who got herself pregnant by the groom and died in childbirth, put a curse on the family: a cycle of doom that has come around again - Justin killed at Le Mans, Dad ... crushed in a straw-baler!"

They drive down to the Hammerton's Hertfordshire power-base. Slade meets the team, including potential world champion Steve Kilby (Lee's ex), and crafty cockney Chris Fogg, a defector from the Seamark camp. His new colleagues despise him on sight.

80 pages (of 216) down. No death's since the really good one right at the beginning, bad sex negligible. Could it be that Guy was losing his touch?

[ripper]

Jasper Hammerton is a great name for a Victorian villain. I can just see him twirling his mustache as he evicts a pleading widow and her sickly baby out into a snowstorm.

[dem bones]

Mark Slade, confronting his darkest fears, takes the Hammerton car for a test spin around the circuit. Nothing fancy, just two laps at a reasonable speed. Bad move. It's been sabotaged! He is fortunate to stumble from the blazing wreck in one piece. Are Marcus Seamark's mob responsible, or is there a bad egg among the five man team? Lee's slept with most of them at one time or another, and thanks to John Clyde, her debonair, ever scowling right hand man, they all know Slade has taken over in that department. Kilby is paranoid and resentful that Slade will replace him as Hammerton's Daytona driver. Chris Fogg, chief mechanic, and his junior 'Waggy' Wagstaffe, are surly and offhand with him. Chris Fogg may be a plant.

Mark moves a sleeping bag into the garage so he can keep an eye on the replacement motor at all times. On the first night he fends off two armed bruisers who escape into the night. Better luck is to follow when trigger-happy gamekeeper Walter Jackson shoots one trespasser dead and badly wounds the other: Mickey the Leg is now bleeding his life away in a coal cellar having been imprisoned their by his employer, a Mr. Patterson. But Patterson is only acting on behalf of a third party. Who is he, this Mr. Big, and why does he want Slade dead?

Still no bad sex as yet, but a welcome pipe-smoking interlude and - not before time - another nasty death has seen the story pick up. Maybe there's something to the Hammerton curse after all as what's left of the victim's head looks like it was stomped by a horse (see cover). Also, from my notebook, lots of "technical stuff about tyres."

It's .... different.

[dem bones]

GNS isn't playing safe with this one. Trouble is, he seems unsure whether he's writing a supernatural horror or a straight murder mystery. Blood Circuit works to a point, and some of the racetrack action is suspenseful, but, for this reader, it all falls down after the very predictable outcome of the Daytona world championship. I'm not sure why the author felt the need to provide a "rational" explanation for the tragedies attributed to the "Hammerton curse," but it doesn't ring true because If 'Patterson' is solely responsible for all of the skull-busting murders inflicted on the current team, much of what we've read over the previous 190 or so pages makes no sense whatsoever. Equally disappointing, the sex interludes between Lee Hammerton and Mark Slade are on their best behaviour throughout, absolutely nothing to frighten the horses. Where are Jenny Lawson and Clive Rowland from The Sucking Pit when we need them most?

[ripper]

Guy is imo at his best and most entertaining when piling on the sex and violence in that early pulpy style of his, and those books are the ones I tend to re-read.