A winner, whoever wrote it

Cut & Run by Alix Bosco (Penguin $37)

According to the terse biographical note, first-time novelist Alix Bosco is "a successful writer in other media." Well, thank goodness for that. One would hate to think that the august House of Penguin has taken to publishing fiction by failed jingle writers or down-table sub-editors who insert commas on the basis that near enough is good enough.

And canny book-buyers will obviously derive comfort from knowing that Bosco, an Aucklander, has runs on the board in related fields of activity. We have to take their word for it though, since "Alix Bosco" is a pseudonym. Crime fiction has a long and mostly honourable tradition of pseudonyms.

Ross Macdonald, one of the greatest names in the genre, is a pen-name; Kenneth Millar wanted to avoid being confused with his wife who wrote mystery novels under her married name. He ended up being confused with John D. MacDonald instead.

Booker Prize winner John Banville has written crime novels under the name Benjamin Black, but as his identity is revealed on the frontispiece and back cover this seems a fairly transparent attempt to have it both ways — reap the benefits of being a literary heavyweight while keeping a fastidious distance from something we're presumably supposed to think was dashed off between serious projects.

Ross Thomas, a rare if uneven talent, put out five novels under the pseudonym Oliver Bleek, possibly because they weren't much good. The disturbingly prolific Donald E. Westlake employed no fewer than 13 pseudonyms, one of which was used for his soft porn output which included All the Girls are Willing, perhaps the most redundant title in the annals of pornography.

It's an interesting decision. Ego, as revealed by a greater interest in recognition than achievement, often fuels the drive to be a published writer, and marketing fiction is difficult enough even with an author prepared to own up to the work. However, we can only respect the writer's preference for anonymity and turn our attention to the text.

The narrator, Anna Markunas, is a former social worker now employed as a researcher for the legal team defending a young South Auckland man charged with the murder of his boyhood friend, a rugby star shot in the back of the head while high on P and donkey-deep in glamorous socialite Mikky St Clair.

That bald summary makes Cut & Run sound lurid. It's not; if anything it could do with taking life and itself a little less seriously. The murder is just the loose thread of a tangled web which isn't fully unravelled until the last chapter, something that's harder to do than it sounds.

Anna is damaged. Her husband committed suicide, she's a recovering depressive, her son is a recovering junkie, her attempts to get back in the saddle, as it were, end in bad sex or non-sex and she's not quite sure which is worse. Her back story is skilfully woven into the narrative until the plot develops momentum and it becomes a distraction; once she's placed in jeopardy I wanted to know what happens next rather than have another session with her dear departed.

The investigative process and Auckland setting and atmospherics are well-handled, although the occasional barrage of place names left me feeling that the narration had been hijacked by a sat-nav device. There's no gory comedy and little in the way of side-of-the mouth one-liners or sparkling dialogue, but if irony is in short supply, so is cynicism.

Not all the behaviour of all of the characters is entirely convincing, but that tends to be the case in this type of crime story which is a puzzle as well as a character study and page-turner. The plot maintains its integrity, neither stooping to unscrupulous information management nor treating the reader like a fool.

No doubt some will see Cut & Run as a roman-a-clef, and for all I know it may well be. But whether the characters are based on real people, or are pure inventions or hybrids, this bleak, topical novel is a substantial achievement and a welcome addition to the slim canon of New Zealand crime fiction.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington reviewer.