Perhaps he was inspired by Alan Garner who, at 88, last year became the oldest ever person to be nominated for the Booker Prize. Maybe as “a life-long reader of thrillers” he thought, as most life-long readers of thrillers do at some point, that thrillers quite often seem formulaic and thus not that hard to knock out.
More likely, I think, having read Deadly Game, is that its author was thinking back to all the not-that-great maverick cop scripts he undoubtedly used to get sent by the truckload in his younger years and getting a little bit misty-eyed. Because rather than writing what he knows, Michael Caine is, in a debut work of fiction that arrives in his 90th year on Planet Earth, here very much writing what he is known for.
So our hero is the 45-year-old DCI Harry Taylor or, to use the no-doubt-correct pronunciation, “’Arry Fackin’ Tay-La”. Born and raised in New Cross, Harry is old school. Know what I mean? Tough but with a good heart. Once headbutted a suspect into unconsciousness. Naturally, Harry is “decked out in pressed Levis 501s, a button-down Lauren shirt and a vintage leather jacket that he had owned since his service days.” He of course “hates any mention of ‘wellness’ as much as he loathes criminals” but also can’t abide — because, I guess, it’s the 2020s — “racist or sexist talk in the canteen”. Inevitably he can’t keep a girlfriend because he’s “married to the job”. He is not a huge fan of paperwork. Or the pen-pushing, career- minded desk monkey bosses upstairs. Still: though Harry might not always play by the rules, by Christ he… well, you get the idea.
“He wasn’t, for Christ’s sake, John Thaw in The Sweeney,” our narrator unconvincingly tells us, sounding a bit like one of those indie bands from the mid-noughties who claimed to have never heard of Joy Division. Or, to shoehorn in a more contemporary reference, like Maisie Peters saying she’s never heard of Taylor Swift. Speaking of shoehorned in contemporary references, Harry drives a Jaguar XJS which, he is sure his younger colleagues think, is “as close as you could get to announcing, ‘I don’t give a toss about climate change’, short of plastering a sticker across the bumper reading, I hate Greta Thunberg”.
It’s impossible to put out of your mind who is at the wheel here. This is both good and bad
Quite a bit more of this follows: there to remind us that we are, for all the analogue-guy-in-a-digital-world stuff, in the present day. “For now,” Caine writes at one point, “Harry needed to stay frostier than Olaf’s arse.” Alongside Frozen’s cold-bummed third lead, TikTok, “ket” and Gettr all make brief cameos. But don’t worry, this is still a world in which everyone is “guv” and Harry’s immediate superior angrily finishes up giving him his orders with a “Capeesh?”
Said orders concern what is to be done about a mysterious black box that has been discovered at a rubbish dump in Stepney Green. It is, we are told on the cover of Deadly Game, “A global conspiracy. A nuclear threat”. Hmm, thinks Harry… can’t be trusting the suits with that one. Time for me to show everyone how it’s done. And so off we go into a world of drug dealers and gangsters and international conspiracy theories and twists and turns and protocols not being strictly adhered to and probably coffee drunk out of Styrofoam cups.
As with watching a Hollywood actor playing bass in a rock band or the bass player in a rock band doing painting or any famous person doing something other than what they are famous for doing, it’s impossible to put out of your mind who is at the wheel here. This is both good and bad. Bad because you constantly think that it’s highly unlikely Deadly Game would have ever been published were it languishing somewhere near the bottom of every lit agent in London’s slush pile under someone else’s name.
Good because, as you’re reading, it’s easy to visualise this story as a below-par Guy Ritchie romp which could be elevated into watchableness by an unbelievably charismatic all-time-great cockney actor doing what he does best. Any idea who that might be?
Deadly Game by Michael Caine is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20)
Hamish MacBain is Deputy Editor, ES Magazine
