I was going to begin this introduction to my new novel Blood Rival with a complicated preamble about ‘spoiler alerts’ but an early review has just been published in The Times in London with the irresistible pull-quote: “What Don Winslow does for Homer’s Iliad in his Danny Ryan trilogy Arnott does for Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex — and the result is just as viscerally entertaining.” Now, not only do I feel utterly humbled to be compared to one of the titans of American crime fiction, but I also feel strangely liberated in that I can be completely direct about the main influence on my novel and what shaped its creation.
By the early 2020s I’d been away from the novel for too long (caught up in long-form TV drama development that seemed to go nowhere) I needed to write something quickly, something fast-paced and propulsive. A psychological thriller presented itself as a possible option. But what? Where do they come from, I pondered, these psychological thrillers. Then it struck me like a bolt from the blue that probably the earliest example of the form was Oedipus Rex. And I quickly realised that there would be a way of turning this ancient myth into a compelling contemporary crime story.
Because it had always struck me that the inciting incident in the Oedipus plotline is something very modern -a traffic dispute that turns into road rage. King Laius, driving his chariot toward a crossroads, meets a younger man driving in the opposite direction. Neither will give way to the other, and an argument ensues, and the youth kills the king. Now, this brought to mind the most infamous case of road rage in recent history in the UK. In 1996 a notorious organised crime figure killed a 21-year-old man after an altercation by a motorway intersection. Petrol driven chariots in a snarl up, with a king-like figure at the helm of one of them. So, I used this the circumstances of this incident but swapped the plot dynamic so that the gangster was killed by a younger assailant.
A Criminal Empire Up For Grabs
‘It happened at the place where three road meet,’ as the Oedipus legend goes. I made this fateful crossroads Junction 1A of the M25, the London Orbital Motorway that circumnavigates the capital. My ‘king’ was a major underworld figure in the county of Kent, parts of which act as a sort of nefarious hinterland to London, much as areas of New Jersey do to New York. The self-styled ‘King of Kent’ was dead, and a criminal empire was now up for grabs.
As I reimagined legend as a modern gangland saga, I found I could take other elements from mythology and merge them with present day reality. So my Sphinx became a corrupt police detective with the foible of using riddles as an interrogation technique (borrowed somewhat from Popeye Doyle in The French Connection). And Tiresias, the sightless prophet, becomes a phone hacker in my version. I had discovered that the practise defined by the ancients as augury referred to a divination from the knowledge of birds. And what could be more like birdsong and aerial flight than telecommunications and social media? Along with surveillance and counter-surveillance skills, the dark arts of data acquisition have become a whole new black market so there was now another criminal subplot to draw upon. And I found out, quite by chance, that the two most famous phone hackers were both born blind, so I felt there was added verisimilitude here.
And at the heart of any gangland drama there’s also a family dynamic. My central protagonist, Jo, is a young widow struggling to survive as lethal power struggles play out around her. I wanted her to have real agency as a character and true grit to show as the plot accelerates into danger. Deep down she’s struggling to come to terms with a dark secret in her past. Something that her now dead husband made her do years ago, as he hid his own double life from her. This was a part of the tale that’s often overlooked, and I wanted to explore the real tragedy of her backstory.
A Compelling Passion
For in the meantime she is driven by desire, a compelling passion that threatens to destroy her and her new lover Eddie. A young chancer drawn into her perilous world by passion and fatal ambition. He has his own dark places, of course, along with an obsessional urge to solve the murder at the crossroads. As he rises to power with Jo, he becomes both criminal and detective, playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with his own shadow.
I soon realised that I could transform Greek tragedy into something like a classic film noir drama, and how both forms so closely resemble each other. Both take us into underworlds of revenge and betrayal, of doomed desire and forbidden love. And there’s a fatalism which takes hold of their characters that seems to go beyond mere individual motive or conscious choice. A sense of destiny becomes a narrative force seemingly higher than the mere mechanics of the plot. A primal story that moves us on an almost instinctive level.
So I honestly believe there’s no need for spoiler alerts with Blood Rival. There are enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing, and new puzzles to solve for fans of mystery as I’ve added a few of my own that go beyond the original story. What I’ve tried to do is to recreate the ultimate psychological thriller (and one that Freud used for his own kind of detective story). Jo, Eddie and the rest of the cast are all trying to figure out who they can trust and who they might need to betray. But they are also struggling to discover where they stand as the drama unfolds, and who and what they are in the great scheme of things. And that’s the greatest mystery of them all, for all of us, the riddle of the self.
(c) Jake Arnott
Jake Arnott’s latest novel Blood Rival is out now.
About Blood Rival by Jake Arnott:
“It happened at a place where three roads meet. Junction 1A of the M25, heading east towards Gravesend. There’s a killer on the road.”
Lee Royle, the notorious ‘King of Kent’, is dead, killed in a brutal act of road rage. But was this a random attack, or was it a premeditated move in a deadly game of betrayal and revenge?
Three lives are set on a collision course: Jo Royle, Lee’s disillusioned and embittered wife, hiding secrets that could kill; Eddie Pierce, Jo’s ambitious new lover, determined to move up the criminal ranks; and Commander Ray Spinks, a corrupt cop with his own claim on Lee’s legacy -and no intention of letting it slip through his fingers.
Caught between lust and loyalty, ambition and guilt, each will risk everything to uncover or bury the explosive truth behind Lee’s death. Because this wasn’t just a murder. It was a reckoning.
Blood Rival is a modern retelling of an ancient story, where Greek tragedy meets neo-noir. A compulsive psychological thriller of forbidden desire, family secrets and fatal ambition.
Order your copy of Blood Rival by Jake Arnott online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
