Someone Got to Eddie: Response

What is my strange obsession with assassins? Perhaps it stemmed from the brilliant, wannabe Kung-Fu flick, Kill Bill. But blood, guts and Tarantino aside, Ian Rankin’s Someone Got to Eddie is gripping, almost difficult to read for its brutality at times. The way Rankin writes the murder of Eddie, the police informant on the Witness Protection Program, is cringe-inducing. “They didn’t want a quick painless death. It was in the contract.” He also uses everyday analogies to describe the gory scene presented to the reader. The killer says the blood that stained the carpet looked “like someone had dropped a mug of tea (no milk) on it.”

There isn’t a lot of dialogue. The speech that’s there is mainly Eddie begging for his life, and the killer mumbling things to himself, or the dying man. In a story that opens with one of the two main characters dying in his living room however, one cannot expect more than that. The minimalist speech Rankin writes does succeed in making the situation a little more real. The murderer/narrator is well written as a character. He often digresses on about one thing or another, chocking up the prattle to his nervousness. The author also paints a vivid picture of Eddie’s final moments, describing a withered old man with tired eyes, a head full of bad thoughts and a lot of enemies. They’re both palpable.

Stylistically I had no quarrels with the piece, but one plot discrepancy made me question its believability. Whereas at the beginning the killer says, “They paid me not to make mistakes. Not that I ever made mistakes…” Not only does he make a mistake –breaking down the door, to make the murder look like a robbery, too early in the crime- and acknowledge it, he also admits to being nervous, visiting the bathroom a total of three times throughout the story. Nevertheless, the overall cringe factor and visceral realness of the story more than makes up for a plot inconsistency.