'Russ Litten's a great story-teller. The Crime Writer is a great story'

REVIEW: The Crime Writer by Russ Litten (New Grass Books 2025)

‘A good writer borrows … a great writer steals’ –

                                                                                    Mark Twain.

IN a whip-smart narrative, Russ Litten’s latest novel has the story of a book  at its heart.

Sam Carter is a creative writing tutor at a prison.

Shaun “Enoch” Powell is an IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) inmate – a man of violence, a man of the street, and a man of letters who now wants to use his most powerful weapon – his words – to tell his life’s story as a cautionary tale.

Between them they write a book that will change both their lives forever, but not in the ways you might think.

And that is one of the gift’s of Litten’s work – it never turns out the way you might think.

The story  - told alternately in the voices of the two protagonists – builds to a screeching climax – and in between, Litten draws these characters with insight, empathy and even sympathy – and as one of the characters says, shows that we are all ‘better than the worst thing we have done.’

The Crime Writer has you questioning who has done worse – the prisoner or his ‘mentor’.

I could not help but think that this story would be a great film too and for me would be shot in the style of the Sidney Lumet classic ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.’

This is a world where Litten – himself a prison writing tutor – is at home. He shows us the lives of the writer Sam Carter and her ‘discovery’ Shaun Powell with such deft skill that if you told me he had done bird I would believe that too, such is his authoritative detailing of prison and the lives therein.

The reader gets to see the day-to-day existence of both characters in such a way that you can still feel sympathy and some empathy for each – even when they are both at their worst.

You kind of understand the swift and senseless violence of Powell as much as you do the borderline duplicity of his tutor who the prisoner trusted with his ‘life’ in words – on the condition that Sam Carter ‘guards it with hers.’

But no one is the villain of their own story – a fact that Litten weaves throughout the unreliable narratives of the book’s key characters.

He gives great insight into Sam and Shaun and the directions not only of their respective moral compasses but also the examinations of their consciences as the tension builds.

You are never entirely sure where the story is going to go. But you do know it is not going to end well – but for whom?

A close reading of the “Author’s Note” may assist – and that is the nearest you will get to a spoiler from this writer!

The Crime Writer will be a reading joy and a writing lesson for you.

It was both for me.

It is well structured and draws it characters brilliantly with strong and convincing dialogue.

But that’s enough lit-crit for now.

Litten is a great story teller.

The Crime Writer is a great story.

 BRIAN W. LAVERY

TO BUY “THE CRIME WRITER” by Russ Litten - AND TO FIND OUT MORE - GO TO: russlitten.co.uk - NOW.