Robbie's Wife

This entry in the Hard Case Crime series doesn't read like a typical pulp-fiction crime novel, at least not at first. For the first 15o pages or so it is like a romance novel, appealing to the fantasies not of bored housewives but of aging male writers. A sixty-year-old screenwriter, Jack Stone, struggles with writer's block. He has just ended a marriage, so he decides to sell everything and take an extended trip to England to see if he can jump-start his creative juices (he says it's because at least they speak English in England, which is I guess a way of explaining why he doesn't move to Tuscany or Corfu). After slogging around along the damp Devon coast, he finds himself in a bed-and-breakfast on a sheep farm, where he falls head over heels for the proprietor's wife, Maggie.

She is, of course, a rarity--a farmer's wife who is also an ex-ballerina and an exquisite beauty. When the two kindle a romance, it is as if the author, Russell Hill, was attempting to fulfill the wishes of every graying lothario who thinks he can still catch the attention of a younger woman. Stone gets moon-eyed over his crush, and the book starts to curdle into hopeless sentimentality.

But then, about two-thirds of the way through, the book takes a vicious turn. Noir fiction is full of plots about cuckolded husbands being done away with, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that things won't turn out well for Robbie, the eponymous farmer of the title. But I must admit the way he's "done away with" and the depths of depravity that Stone sinks to took me by astonishment.

Hill does a very nice job depicting the dreariness of the English countryside, and in the last few pages manages to ease over any concerns I had with the unbelievability of the romance between Stone and Maggie. My advice for anyone who picks this up is to stick with it, despite the lugubrious beginning.