Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1194 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

1984 is BACK!!
WOW!!!!! It has a great George Orwell's 1984 feel about it, it keeps the tension throughout and draws you into the emotions of the characters throughout, then just as you feel that you are getting to know them, the author takes out a sledge hammer and hits you across the back of the head. A Great book and I can't wait to read more from the author

Too many cliches and twists
I have just read this book (in its Spanish translation), and although it is an easy read, and gripping enough to make you read it in almost one take, my final feeling is disappointment.

I expected a grim description of the Stalin years, and the difficulties of an honest man to survive in this environment; also a gradual loss of faith in a system from a believer faced with reality.

Instead I found a truckload of cliches (from the cells of the Lubianka to the queues in the state stores, from the evil agents to the fake dissidents), where the characters are flat and their feelings, as the changing loyalties, or love itself, are described as if they were a mathematical equation; instead of following the rule "show, don't tell". The character of Leo if way too naive to have been promoted, and even survived in the MGB, and his conversion is too abrupt.

And if the beginning is poor, the second half is completely awful. The coincidence in the identity of the killer is completely implausible; the escape of the train and in general all the adventures (clearly thought as for a movie) are incredible.

Not to mention the happy ending, probably written thinking of sequels. A realistic ending would be more like Xavier March's in Robert Harris "Fatherland" (that is orders of magnitude better than Child 44).

The writing is quite simple, and look as if the author know Russia only from an encyclopedia. The names of the characters seem picked from the news, and the way they speak sounds fake. For instance, where are the patronymics? A formal conversation, as between an agent and his C.O. would always include them. And the opposite, wouldn't be two brothers, Pavel and Alexei, be calling each other "Pasha" and "Alyosha"?

In conclusion, this book is clearly disappointing, and seems just a standard bestseller, easy to read but of very limited quality.

Almost ... but not quite
I have to agree with some of the previous reviews: I felt that the first three quarters of this book was superb - in fact, I read it in one sitting. The writing was taught and his characters well-formed. But I have to say that I was disappointed by the very implausible ending. I found the "connection" between Leo and the killer rather convenient - TOO convenient - and I don't feel the author ever explained satisfactorily the motivation for the WAY in which the children were killed. I mean, WHY were the stomachs of the children removed ... and then cooked and fed to the cats?! Surely that requires more of an explanation than, "I wanted to attract your attention"!

I have other problems with the ending (too lengthy to expound on here), and so I give this book 3 (actually 3 1/2) stars: one star for each of the first three quarters of the book.

That being said, this is a writer to watch and I look forward to more books from this author.