Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #957 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-03
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.com

About the Author ~ Tom Rob Smith
Tom Rob Smith was born in l979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and was brought up in London where he still lives. He graduated from Cambridge in 2001 and spent a year in Italy on a creative writing scholarship. Tom has worked as a screenwriter for the past five years, including a six-month stint in Phnom Penh storylining Cambodia's first ever soap. .

Exclusive Amazon.co.uk Interview with Tom Rob Smith

What is Child 44 about?

Child 44 is a thriller set in the terror of 1950s Stalinist Russia, a brutal regime that executed anyone who disagreed with its dogma. It proclaimed to be a perfect society. So, when a series of brutal murders take place, no one is permitted to say that these are the work of a serial killer. In a perfect society there can be no crime.

One man, Leo Demidov, a State security agent, a man who has spent his entire career arresting innocent men and women, decides to redeem himself by catching this killer. To do so, he must buck the system, risking his life and the life of everyone he loves.

What inspired you to write it?

It was inspired by a true story, a killer called Andrei Chikatilo who murdered over sixty children, girls, boys, over a period of ten years. Reading about the case I realized this wasn't a criminal mastermind who'd evaded capture through devious skill. He'd gone on killing for so long because the system refused to admit he even existed. He should've been caught on numerous occasions but the prejudices of the State got in the way and, as a result, tragically, many children died. I felt such a tremendous sense of frustration reading about the events that I saw its potential as a piece of fiction.

The real killer murdered in the 1980s. In Child 44 I moved the story back to the 1950s, when the stakes were much higher for someone who dared to risk opposing the State.

Who are your literary influences?

In one sense, any book that I've ever read, good or bad.

To answer the question more usefully authors who have directly influenced Child 44 are Graham Greene, Robert Louis Stephenson, Thomas Harris and Arthur Conan-Doyle. Child 44 is as much an adventure as it is a detective story.

If you could recommend just one "must-read book" to anyone, what would it be and why?

There are so many wonderful books. However, connecting to Child 44, I'd say The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Whenever I've mentioned the book to people who haven't read it, they understandably presume it to be melancholy. Much of it is brutal but he is also brilliantly witty, slicing up the absurdities of the regime. It's an incredible book - or, rather, three books, but there is an abridged edition published by Harvill.

What top tips do you have for anyone looking to write their first book?

There's a lot of advice already out there. One issue is being able to recognize which advice is good and which is bad, advice that works for one person, might prove disastrous for someone else.

Amazon.co.uk
With so many new books in the crime and thriller field vying for our attention, alert readers need all the help they can get. In the case of Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, the numerous glowing reviews were preceded by a lively word of mouth on the book. The latter can often be misleading, but not in this case -- this is a very exciting debut. It is set in the Soviet Union and in the year 1953; Stalin's reign of terror is at its height, and those who stand up against the might of the state vanish into the labour camps - or vanish altogether. With this background, it is an audacious move on Tom Rob Smith's part to put his hero right at the heart of this hideous regime, as an officer in no less than the brutal Ministry State Security.

Leo Demidov is, basically, an instrument of the state -- by no means a villain, but one who tries to look not too closely into the repressive work he does. His superiors remind him that there is no crime in Soviet Union, and he is somehow able to maintain its fiction in his mind even as he tracks down and punishes the miscreants. The body of a young boy is found on railway tracks in Moscow, and Demidov is quickly informed that there is nothing to the case. He quickly realises that something unpleasant is being covered over here, but is forced to obey his orders. However, things begin to quickly unravel, and this ex-hero of state suddenly finds himself in disgrace, exiled with his wife Raisa to a town in the Ural Mountains. And things will get worse for him -- not only the murder of another child, but even the life and safety of his wife.

Tom Rob Smith's beleaguered hero is a protagonist who we know will (at some point) have to rebel against the totalitarian state he works for. But it is the suspense of waiting for this moment as much as the exigencies of the thriller plot that makes this such a compelling novel. --Barry Forshaw

Lee Child
"An amazing debut - rich, different, fully-formed, mature ... and thrilling."

Customer Reviews

Superb Thriller
I heard about this book on the radio and when Louis de Bernières and others gave it such glowing reviews I rushed straight out and bought it. I wasn't disappointed. It's one of the best thrillers I've read for a long time. My only disappointment is that its Tom Rob Smith's debut novel and so I can't read anything else he's written!

I've read that Ridley Scott was so impressed with this book he bought the film rights. I'll look forward to seeing this great story on the big screen.

Excellent Debut Based on a Real Soviet Serial Killer
I generally don't care for serial killer stories, I find that everyday "regular" crime holds plenty of drama and is much easier to connect with. However, the Soviet setting of this debut thriller intrigued me enough to dip into it for a few pages, and the writing on those first few pages swept me into the story very quickly. For the first 3/4, it's an excellent grafting of the serial killer genre onto the everyday horror of the early-'50s Stalinist era Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Smith succumbs to the thriller writer's temptation of having a huge plot twist toward the end, which unnecessarily sabotages what had been a grim and realistic story to that point. It's one of those twists that comes out of nowhere, and really doesn't serve much purpose other than as a "gotcha" moment -- the story could have worked just as effectively without it.

Other than this one vastly annoying flaw, the book is excellent. After a chilling prologue in the famine-devastated Ukraine of the 1930s (a famine engineered by Stalin, it must be noted), the story opens in 1953 Moscow, where we meet Great Patriotic War hero and militia officer Leo Demidov, as he pursues the interests of the state in tracking down its enemies. Smith takes plenty of time to build up the totalitarian setting, where fear and paranoia reigned, and reason was a luxury unavailable to the state. If you were a suspect, you were guilty, since the state did not make mistakes. The story focuses on Demidov, showing the privileges his family enjoys due to his position, and the precariousness of his position as a jealous underling plots to destroy him. (This underling is the weakest element in the book, as his hatred for Demidov is a critical catalyst several times in the story, but the motivation for it is far too one-dimensional.)

It isn't until 1/3 of the way into the book that the serial killer plotline starts to assert itself, and Leo begins to realize that the same killer might have struck hundreds of miles apart. It's also at this point that I realized that Smith was taking the case of the real-life Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo (aka "The Rostov Ripper") and moving it back in time a few decades. The killer's background, physical details, MO, and more are all based on the Chikatilo case. (I find it a little bit odd that while the "further reading" section at the end of the book makes a passing mention to a book on the Chikatilo case, Smith doesn't explain who Chikatilo was or just how directly he drew upon the case for the book. There have been several non-fiction books written about the case, and two mediocre films based on it: Citizen X and Evilenko.) In any event, once Leo starts to suspect the existence of such a killer, he is severely hamstrung in his ability to do anything about it -- partly because the existence of such a madman is incompatible with the utopian ideals of the Soviet state. To admit such a killer would be to admit the imperfection of the state.

As Leo's star falls, he is also subject to a shock in his personal life which makes him question everything. Galvanized to find and kill the serial killer as an act of redemption, he manages to enlist some help even as he comes under further pressure from his nemesis. A classic trope of the thriller is that the hunter/truth-seeker becomes the hunted, and Smith pulls just such a maneuver off brilliantly. The book picks up momentum, and other than the unnecessary plot twist mentioned above, races toward the climactic showdown with great skill. It's an excellent debut novel, and should have wide appeal to fans of thrillers, the serial killer subgenre, and fans of Martin Cruz Smith.

Harrowing
'Child 44' is a harrowing and powerful novel. The author has really captured a sense of the oppressive brutality of the USSR in 1953. Some passages are almost unbearable to read - particularly with regard to the treatment of the civilian population by the MGB. And the fate of Leo's parents is quite heart-breaking.

The 'mystery' aspect of the novel - for me - becomes secondary to the story of Leo and Raisa's relationship. And sometimes the search for the killer seems a bit far-fetched.

But the gritty, claustrophobic integrity of the book lingers after reading. Tom Rob Smith has researched the period very well indeed. The first chapter regarding the starving villagers in the Ukraine is ghastly, but essential history that should never be allowed to recede from human memory.

This is an involving, upsetting but rewarding novel.