Taxi! (Black Cabs - John McLaren)

Name: george_lazenby

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Product:	Black Cabs - John McLaren
Date:	21/08/01 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A decent read, smart gimmick

Disadvantages: Eminently forgettable

All you need is one idea, and assuming your publishers market the book well, you have got it made. The idea can be childishly simple, as long as it lodges in the mind of the potential reader’s mind, as long as a good one-liner can be found for the advert – bingo.

John McLaren’s book ‘Black cabs’ has a fabulous single idea: black cab drivers overhear information from finance types when they work in the City, and make a killing using this inside information to buy shares. Whether the book is or is not any good is more or less irrelevant – as with most things the quality of the product is less important than whether or not it can be easily marketed to the punters.

After that, the book almost writes itself. It could be a dark thriller (there is a murder), a jolly farce (there is a bed-hopping cockney cabbie), or a crappy tear-jerking epic (no, really, there’s a child dying of cystic fibrosis) – it doesn’t actually matter what the book is about. Once the spin-doctors have hooked bored civil servant in WHSmiths with a long train journey to look forward to, the content is largely irrelevant.

Indeed, it’s an ideal airport / train station bookshop item. For people who work in the North and have to regularly attend meetings in London and Edinburgh, or vice versa, ‘Black Cabs’ has the benefit being being very much a five hour book, so you can do the first half on the way down and the second half on the way back, or the whole thing, skipping some of the dull patches (of which there are a few) on a standard plane journey into Europe.

You’ll notice that I haven’t really talked about what I thought of the book itself – partially, I don’t think that’s relevant. The hook is sufficiently good that people will read it anyway. I think ‘Black Cabs’ is interesting as a classic example of the book as a commodity, something with a slick cover
that can be reproduced well in ads, and a good one-line plot which will hook readers like farmed salmon.

OK, but if you’re insisting to know something about the book as a book, then I’ll have a go. ‘Black Cabs’ is fundamentally adequate. There isn’t actually much padding, and some attention has been given to character and feeling. The kid with cystic fibrosis – the reason why the cabbies decide to go for broke and attempt to make a really big score – is an admirably unsentimental creation and a genuinely funny character, while the cabbies are generally drawn with great warmth and affection.

Two obvious problems assert themselves. The author is a former investment banker, which is good because it means that he can detail the ins and outs of financial horse-trading with confidence and detail, and is bad because sometimes it’s like reading a Michael Ridpath novel (which for me is a synonym for ‘sitting in numb astonishment at what crap people will pay good money to read’). People who make money in the City may be vital to the economy, but I couldn’t give a flying **** whether they live or die. They are, to me, non-human drones, and I don’t want to read about them.

The second problem is the book’s descent into breezy farce in the second half. This was good in a way, because on my return journey from London, I had lost my wallet and was cheesed off, so the second half’s unapologetic daftness cheered me up no end. But I think that McLaren didn’t actually know how to finish his novel once the smartness of his gimmick had worn off, so he just started being silly – I don’t think it was a matter of inspiration as much as desperation.

Anyway, there’s probably someone on a Virgin train just outside Lichfield at this moment who’s glad they bought this rather than something by Jeffrey Archer, but further than that, it’s an e
ntertainment, nothing more.

Summary: