After a lifetime of playing fast and loose with anything and everyone in her way, Babs’ devil-may-care attitude for her latest drug-dealing scheme is going to blow up in her face: infringing on the opioid turf of a Canadian gangster known only as Ogopogo sends a dangerous emissary her way in the form of The Man. Meanwhile, her wayward youngest daughter Sis has gone missing at a time when her years-long plans to rejuvenate her dead former industrial town of Waterville, Maine, are about to possibly bear fruit with significant investment funding. Enemies near and far mass, violence is everywhere and a righteous fire threatens to engulf them all.
Great books - and I mean Really Fucking Great Books that’ll be around for a long, long time - are still being written, even in our wretched digital age of AI gibberish: case in point, Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, which is nothing short of a miracle of a novel. An honest-to-goodness masterpiece that floored me from the beginning to the end.
The book opens in a centuries-swirling hallucination of tough women living through tough times before settling on an utterly brutal incident that introduces us to the title character, aged 14 in 1968. After this blistering opening scene, we land in late June/early July 2016, where still another horrific event happens to Babs’ daughter Lori, a former Marine back from the Second Gulf War. This is a story that grabs you immediately and hurtles you forward relentlessly - a mere two chapters in and I was madly in love with this story, this writer, this world, and was completely absorbed in it.
Ron Currie has the storytelling gift of getting you invested in literally every character - no matter how fleeting their time in the story is - in a way I’ve seen in only two other writers: John Steinbeck and early years Stephen King. Which is to say that, while I could tell you about every character - yes, they’re that memorable - and that I enjoyed reading about them, I’ll just say that there’s no character in the story I ever didn’t want to spend time with: they’re all aces.
The standout by far is The Man. I loves me an unstoppable assassin and this maniac ranks up there with the likes of Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men), The Judge (Blood Meridian), The T-1000 (Terminator 2), and The Corinthian (The Sandman). Fantastic dialogue, inspired origin story, and every single damn scene this lunatic was in was absolutely electrifying. Perfect characterisation across the board.
You know how good this book is? It can have characters like Rex White - a drug dealing serial killer - and Allegedly Amy - a kind of soccer mom stereotype who is also another terrifying consigliere to Ogopogo - two characters whom you could easily hang entire books on, and they’re only in a handful of scenes between them. That’s how chock-full this novel is with great stuff.
Alongside these great characters, Currie has them doing interesting things to fill the book up with action and keep you turning the pages (I rarely read books at this kind of speed - I had to pace myself to stop wolfing this down in a night, so I could savour the quality; I still read this in 4 days). Every scene with The Man was my favourite, but the mystery of the missing daughter was great, Babs’ dealing with her shitty son-in-law’s domestic abuse was satisfying, and even the sub-plot of Babs’ tweaker nephew knocking over a local pharmacy was brilliant in how it connected to the larger storylines. The theme of identity is ever-present but never over-emphasised in a clumsy way.
After the fact, aspects of the story stood out to me as kinda wobbly. How did nobody report a fire in a junkyard? Babs’ Fourth of July funding venture came out of nowhere and didn’t quite work. The serial killer getting a conscience ostensibly to deepen the mystery felt contrived. The fate of The Man seemed weirdly random. The priest with the heart of gold/troubled past is a cliche. The grandson’s change in personality was very abrupt.
But, even in hindsight - because in the moment, you’re so swept up in the strength of the storytelling that you don’t notice - these feel like nitpicks. Because even just one scene - like Ogopogo’s first and last meeting with Babs’ ladies - are so epic, they dwarf the nitpicks into nothing. And there are so many scenes that are on this scale of epic, that nothing that small could diminish the overwhelmingly powerful impression that the novel makes on the reader.
If you enjoy crime stories, whatever the format - whether it’s comics like Brubaker/Phillips’ Criminal or David Lapham’s Stray Bullets, the first season of True Detective or any season of Breaking Bad, or the novels of Dennis Lehane, Ken Bruen or Jim Thompson - then you’ll love Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, which more than proves the equal of such exalted company in the pantheon of the greatest crime fiction.
I also learned after finishing the book that this will become a series, which makes me happy to know that there’s more brilliance on the way, but which also makes sense. There’s a depth and richness hinted at in the years we don’t read about during Babs’ life that it’s easy to see why Currie is going back and telling those stories next - and I can’t wait to see how those stories play out too.
Not just the best novel I’ve read this year, but one of the best crime novels I’ve ever read - I couldn’t recommend this one more to readers who are into bleak, intensely exciting stories about the dark, yet always humanised, characters that exist on the edges of society and their nightmarish, exhilarating lives. Sheer pleasure, non-stop, first class entertainment all the way with this one, guys - loved it.
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