Cold Caller by Jason Starr has been dubbed white collar noir and having read and enjoyed his short thriller it is easy to see why it has attracted that tag. Cold Caller gets darker the more you read and the more you read the easier it is to identify with Bill Moss. If you have ever worked in a call centre those soul destroying places that are the modern satanic mills then you will closely identify with what Starr has written, especially about some of the daft rules that are in place. Bill Moss used to be important in advertising but he had to now work in a call centre while trying to get back in to the advertising world. He kept seeing idiots being promoted while was stuck in his cubicle making the contacts for the sales team. When humiliated by his line manager the seeds of destruction were sown in his mind. At the same time Bill’s world with his girlfriend Julie was starting to unravel as was every other aspect of his life. His work was stifling him his girlfriend was stifling him and he was slowly reacting against it. When workers were being let go he thought he too would be shown the door but somehow ended up being promoted. The more he wanted to rise in the job the more willing he was to kill his boss Ed to get there and destroy the evidence in the process. Even after murdering Ed, Bill’s life really does spiral out of control until he has no control over his life whatsoever. Even at the end we see the cycle of offending start again even though things will be a rather lot harder for him. Cold Caller is a well written scary noir story with some excellent twists that leave you guessing all the way to the end. This thriller is both dark and funny at the same time set in a world where a great many people can identify with Bill Moss. An excellent addition to the American Noir shelves a book that you will regret not reading sooner.

Bill Moss should by now be something big in advertising, but instead finds himself making cold calls in a New York office, working for a man he hates and living with a woman who annoys him. Sometimes life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and it can be easy to overreact when something goes wrong. Bill’s life soon turns into a nightmare, but how much of it is of his own making? When this arrived for me to review from the Real Readers programme I wasn’t really sure what it make of it. The cover doesn’t give a lot of clues, other than quotes saying it’s in the great tradition of American noir, and the illustration on the front makes it look like a horror novel. Now that I’ve read it I’m not sure that I can categorise it any better and I don’t really know whether I enjoyed it or not. I did like the New York setting as I’ve watched so many films and TV series set there (as well as visited a couple of times) that it felt quite familiar. Bill seemed like someone I had come across before as he seems to stand for the middle-class white male with a college education who thinks the world owes him a living. He has a very robust sense of himself and is convinced he’s always in the right and that everyone else is wrong, deluded or being deliberately obtuse. I didn’t find him a likeable character or even a particularly interesting one at the start of the book and my view of him deteriorated as I progressed. He’s a very fixed character and despite everything he goes through in the course of his story he’s exactly the same man at the end as at the beginning. The reader gets no feeling of satisfaction at journey’s end as Bill appears to have learned nothing. There’s a definite element of very black comedy and even farce in Cold Caller and in this it reminded me of American Psycho – there are many similarities between the two works. There isn’t as much explicit violence in this as in Bret Easton Ellis’s work, but there’s enough. There’s also racism, sexism and too many other negative –isms to easily list. This is a short book written in an easily-readable style and entirely in the first person, so we have no option but to listen to Bill’s interior monologue and be subjected to this views. The reader only sees the other characters through his eyes and it can take a concerted effort to compare the reality of what’s happening with his view of it. His very distorted image of the people and world around him made me pity the other characters even more for having to put up with him! So all in all I found this book a bit of a puzzle. I wasn’t sure what (if anything) it was trying to be and say, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much beyond wondering what it was aiming for. It left me with a nasty taste in my mouth and the niggling feeling that I’m missing something vital. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I were a man.