Review: The Whites by Harry Brandt

The Whites by Harry Brandt (Bloomsbury, £12.99)

The name may be unfamiliar but the chances are, if you’re reading this review, you will know of his previous work. Harry Brandt’s real name is Richard Price, whose award-winning novel, Clockers, was filmed by Spike Lee. His screenwriting credits include The Color of Money, Sea of Love and the remake of Shaft. Despite the name-change The Whites, a devastating depiction of crime and punishment, mines a similar seam to its predecessors. More importantly, it is just as good — if not better.

The title is cop-speak for the ones who got away, crooks who proved impossible to convict. Twenty years on, six members of a gung-ho group that was “willing to make a discreet hash of the rule book” are still haunted by their “Whites”, all of them men who got away with murder. Now someone is bumping them off one by one.

The stereophonic narrative is shared by two serving officers: family man Billy Graves and fruit-loop Milton Ramos, who still holds Billy’s wife, Carmen, responsible for the death of his mother and two brothers. He has a point: as a spiteful teen she said something that ended up blighting both their lives. Now Milton, overwhelmed by “loss and loss and loss”, is out for revenge.

As Milton plays cat and mouse with his unsuspecting colleague — first targeting Billy’s sons then his father, an ex-cop succumbing to dementia — his, and our, blood pressure soars. And yet Brandt still makes us feel for the evil Milton: “galled to the edge of his teeth by the divide between the grief givers and the grief takers, the fuckers and the fucked”. He cares so much that he doesn’t care about himself at all. Not Paradise Lost but Paradox Found.

Billy is by no means a saint, either. His lies once scuppered the promising career of a female journalist. It is payback time all round — especially when he suspects that the killer of the Whites lies close to him.

The wealth of freakish incident encountered by the cops — “a home owner had been shot by his lawnmower while cutting the backyard” — is reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh’s Hollywood series of police procedurals. Throughout, the culprits are referred to as “actors” not “malefactors”. However, the result, while equally gripping, is less flippant, less sentimental. If a more powerful crime novel is published this year it will be a bleeding miracle.