Review: Backfire - Charles L. Burgess
A while back, I Charles Burgess’s novel THEOTHER WOMAN, which was published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 andreprinted last year by Stark House as part of their great Black Gat Books line.Burgess, a Florida author who specialized in writing articles for the true crimemagazines, wrote only two novels, and his other one, BACKFIRE, was very rare,having been published only in Australia. Now the good folks at Stark House havetracked it down and reprinted it as well, along with Burgess’s only short storyand a selection of his true crime yarns. I’ve just read BACKFIRE.
The novel’s protagonist is Martin Powers, about as normal and run-of-the-mill aguy as you could find. He’s a salesman for a cosmetics company and is recentlymarried to a beautiful brunette named Angela. He has a pretty good life, he thinks—untilsomebody starts trying to kill him.
After several failed attempts on his life, Martin’s wife brings in the cops, inthe person of a hulking detective named Sam Bannerman. Unfortunately, Bannermandoesn’t seem to be able to make any progress in finding out who wants Martindead. So Martin figures if he wants to stay alive, he’d better do someinvestigating himself. He was adopted as a young child and knows very littleabout his background, so he decides that would be a good place to start. Heproves to be a clever, dogged detective, too, and starts uncovering things. Butwill he arrive at the ultimate answer before his mysterious enemy knocks himoff?
BACKFIRE is a well-constructed mystery/suspense novel that generatesconsiderably urgency and kept me flipping the pages. I think Burgess revealedsome key elements of the plot maybe a tad too early, but that didn’t take awayfrom my overall enjoyment of the book. He keeps the central questions unanswereduntil late in the book and keeps tightening the screws on Martin until asatisfying climax.
Maybe due to Burgess’s background as a true crime author, there’s a strongsense of realism to this book, as well, a sense that the investigation reallycould have gone this way. There’s nothing flashy about the style, juststraight-ahead storytelling, but in a story like this, that’s a very effectiveapproach. I'm sorry Burgess didn't write more novels. I had a fine time reading BACKFIRE and give it a high recommendation.It’s available in and editions. I haven’t yet read thetrue crime articles that round out the book, but I intend to.
