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The lasting lure of a life in
crime
Viva La Madness
By JJ Connolly
Duckworth £7.99
 A
convoluted tale of drug-dealing, money-laundering, faked death,
IT trickery, torture, and good old-fashioned violence, Viva La
Madness is a darkly comic thriller, fast-paced, full of alarms and
surprises, written in Guy Ritchie geezerspeak (your home is your drum,
to kill someone is to serve them, cocaine is cha-cha, and major
swearwords have the status of punctuation marks). The story begins
promisingly: the resolutely unnamed narrator wants to quit his
Caribbean bar and return to a life of crime for one big payday so he
can retire in comfort. He puts out feelers, and the noble black dude,
Monty, a staunch figure on the London crime scene, comes to Barbados
with a proposition and two murderous gangsters in tow, Sonny King and
Roy "Twitchy" Burns. Our narrator returns to London and soon
finds himself in an imbroglio involving two sets of Venezuelan
mobsters, an Irish family of psychos, lots of cocaine, a priceless
memory stick, and plenty of people "getting served". The
story loses its intensity as it becomes ever more complicated,
however; in the middle sections of the book there is way too much
backstory and explanation, and too many chapters ending with lines
such as: "Bridget whispers one more thing ... and leaves."
What did she whisper? This sort of thing makes it impossible to
believe in the narrator as a character (the absence of a name doesn't
help); it's just JJ Connolly playing tricks.
But there are some
effective set-pieces (including a chase in an underground tunnel) and,
if Guy Ritchie hasn't optioned this yet, he certainly should.
— The Independent
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