To Be Frank
Kevan Christie
(Book Guild, £9.99)
Journalist Frank Savage is a man who’s outlived his era. A mid-fifties divorcé, he’s the kind of old-school hack whose natural habitat is the pub and who isn’t above slipping a police officer a few quid for a story. But times have changed, and his role now is to provide clickbait for his employers, “Tranent Man with Bionic Penis Inundated with Date Offers” being the website’s current front-runner.
He drinks hard, smokes, lives on bacon rolls and has developed gout, against which his only defence is an eye-catching pair of Crocs. Frank is renowned for his cynicism and abrasiveness, and when he writes a column about banning dogs and babies from cafés it unexpectedly goes viral. From staring redundancy in the face, Frank Savage becomes the site’s star writer.
This sudden burst of notoriety coincides with a visit from his London-based daughter, Naomi. Naomi is a successful venture capitalist and has come to assess the viability of restoring and reopening the cinema near her father’s Portobello home. Frank, a Roger Moore man at heart, couldn’t be more pleased. What Naomi isn’t telling him is that the company she works for is a front for a criminal enterprise, and her boss is only interested in the cinema as a means of laundering drug money.
That’s the premise for Kevan Christie’s comedic crime caper, in which Frank has to cope with his mounting debts, his burgeoning fame as a figurehead for the politically incorrect, the reappearance of the far-right drug dealer he holds responsible for his brother’s death 35 years earlier and his gradual realisation that he’s got caught up in a turf war between gangsters competing for exclusive drug rights to Edinburgh.
Frank’s nemesis, Brewster, is as flawed and borderline pathetic as Frank himself. A former neo-Nazi hooligan who has reinvented himself as a community benefactor, he seems to be finding the respectable front for his unlawful activities more alluring than he expected: a possible escape route from a life of criminality that wearies him. Behind the tough exterior, he’s even having trouble mustering up the conviction to maintain his lifelong racism. But for the moment he’s still pursuing the dream of becoming Edinburgh’s top drug lord and tormenting his former schoolmate Frank Savage in any way he can. He may be a low-grade bottom-feeder compared to Naomi’s fearsome boss, but he’s still capable of putting a spanner in the works and making Frank’s life a misery.
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Drawing on his 14 years in journalism, Christie has turned out a very assured debut novel that hits all the right beats but can’t take itself entirely seriously, and is all the better for it. There is a dark side to To Be Frank, its characters wrestling with untimely death, grief, abusive childhoods, deception and even a few grisly murders, but Christie’s forte is comedy and he brings a lightness of touch to even the darkest moments. A character like the Gypsy, for instance, certainly isn’t meant to be taken as a realistic kingpin of crime.
The shifts in tone are never exactly jarring, but they can swing quite wildly, usually when Frank gets drunk in public and sends a situation spiralling into slapstick chaos, such as the Hogmanay debacle broadcast on live TV, which doesn’t connect with the gangster storyline at all but does demonstrate his apparent determination to dynamite what’s left of his career in the most spectacular way possible.
With memorable characters, engaging humour and a cosy Portobello setting, newcomer Christie has come galloping out of the starting gate with a consistently entertaining debut.
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