Review: `I didn't kill anyone is the only truth I know.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 16, 2014
British author Derryl Flynn grew up in a northern coal mining town in England during the fifties and sixties. While majoring in Film-Theatre & TV at Bradford College of Art in the early seventies he developed a passion for writing drama for screenplay & radio. He has served as a football coach/manager and has worked in the soft furnishings trade for the last twenty years, returning to this passion for writing with a debut novel in 2008 an now with this his second book. His home is Bradford, England.Flynn's affinity for the down-and-out rings true. His dialogue is raw in content but smartly executed in style. He rapidly catches the reader's attention from page one, gradually unfolds his story as a blurry blend of memory altered by separation from the real world and filtered into the prison atmosphere via radio and television. Flynn opens his story with the main character's reflections that reflect the quality of his writing throughout the book: `I was a young man, just twenty-five when I was wrongly convicted of murder. I'm fifty-one years old now and my take on the intervening years changes from month to month, week to week and day to day. When I look in a mirror a broken old man stares back through the glass, a stranger. A head of dry, lifeless silvery hair, that I mostly keep tied back in a band, has long since replaced my flowing flaxen mane. The spark in my once carefree eyes long extinguished. Greying stubble, often days old, hides features that time has etched with misery, which tobacco and dope have left pallid and drawn - I try not to look in mirrors. If I have to speak, along with the bitter cynicism that has grown inside me like a cancer, my words come out hoarse and chesty due to massive saltpetre ingestion.'And so we encounter Jack Smith, physically released from prison but in many ways permanently soiled by the degree of his need for revenge - he is determined to prove his innocence and to find his daughter from whom he has been physically separated during those years of incarceration. Through his re-connecting with old friends as well as his passion for making music and when he encounters a lawyer of substance,he begins his ascent back into sanity and security.The story is well constructed and related in a fashion that makes the reader reexamine the changes that have occurred in our recent past, changes so patently obvious to Jack Smith as he reenters the world after 25 years of absence: `Traffic roars on the streets; people getting on with their lives, coping with the daily grind, week after week, month after month, year after year. No past, no present, no future. And I'm invisible. I only exist in a parallel universe, forced to observe a worldI've learned to hate, from a bubble. Through the privilege of a TV screen I've seen the results of wars and pestilence on a grand scale. I've learned new phrases like Tsunami and Nine-Eleven. I've watched politicians from all parties wringing their hands and paying lip service to an ever more frightened public in an increasingly sick world.'Powerful writing, a compelling story, and an examination of where we are, today. Grady Harp, March 14