Red Means Run

By Brad Smith

Simon & Schuster Canada, 320 pp., $16.99

There are few tropes quite so long-lived - nay, hoary - as "someone accused of a crime they didn't commit" and "someone on the run from the law as they try to prove their innocence." From Kafka's Joseph K. to television's (and later film's) The Fugitive, the tropes draw on our own inner fears, our native, subconscious terror of helplessness and persecution. The tropes are so familiar because they work so well.

Their familiarity over generations has, however, blunted their edges: We still react with horror to truelife stories of unjust persecution (see the media storm over the West Memphis Three, for example), but a book or film that features a character facing charges for a crime they didn't commit is almost a comfortable exercise at this point.

So what's a writer to do? If you're Canadian mystery writer Brad Smith, you treat the tropes with the respect they deserve, gain resonance and tension from their inherent power and build the story out of rocksolid fundamentals of characterization, narrative twists and complex relationships. The resulting new novel, Red Means Run, is a winner.

Virgil Cain is a farmer in rural New York state, clever without being particularly smart, kind to his neighbours (when they deserve it) and generous of spirit (he fosters abused horses brought to him after their rescues). Virgil is in mourning: His wife Kirstie was murdered, and the accused killer - a rich, failing and twisted record producer named Alan Comstock - was acquitted of the charges thanks to the machinations of his lawyer, Mickey Dupree. When Dupree is found murdered on a golf course, Cain's barroom threat that "somebody ought to do the world a favour and blow your f-ing head off" comes back to haunt him and he is promptly arrested for the crime.

While most of the police officers are convinced of Cain's guilt, detective Claire Marchand - smart, though not particularly clever - isn't so sure. Even after Cain escapes and Comstock himself is found murdered, Marchand is still convinced that someone else is responsible for the killings, and she puts her career on the line for the farmer she not only believes in, but is starting to find herself attracted to.

From that brief description, Red Means Run is archetypal "wrongfully accused, on the run, trying to clear one's name" storytelling, and it succeeds admirably even at just that level. Events unfold with a clear, clockwork precision, and readers can surrender themselves easily to the familiarity of the broad storyline, and will be richly rewarded for doing so.

Smith transcends the familiarity of the tropes, though, with the richness and the depth of his storytelling. This is anchored, firmly, with realistic, complex characterizations. Take Marchand: She could have been drawn as little more than a broad-strokes cliché, the cop who believes in the wrongfully accused, with a side of simmering, slowly coming to the boil sexual tension (think Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight).

Rather than settling for that level of character-as-plotdevice, Smith imbues Marchand with a complex history of relationships (her ex-husband still pines for her, and has a habit of showing up at her house uninvited and unwelcome), an inquisitive intelligence and a keen level of self-awareness that makes her growing attraction to Cain a conscious and almost deliberate process.

Similarly, Cain's own back story is complicated, and not quite as simple as it originally appears. It also brings him into glancing contact with a world of the nouveau riche men of upstate New York, and their wives, all of a certain age and a similar blondness.

(My only issue with the book is that these women could have been more clearly differentiated earlier on; as it stands, I had to refer back to earlier chapters to tell one aging trophy wife from another.)

Red Means Run is a genuinely thrilling pleasure from a Canadian writer who has been overlooked for too long. Smith has keen instincts as a storyteller and I have yet to be even passingly disappointed by any of his books. If you haven't read him before, start with Red Means Run, then treat yourself to his previous novels: Each one is a unique, singular treat.

Robert J. Wiersema is a writer and bookseller in Victoria, and the author of Bedtime Story and Walk Like a Man.