Birdman

By Mo Hayder, 1999, Doubleday, 327 pages
Reviewed by Jim Satsiowski, July 25, 2020

“Bullitt” ruined cops fiction.

The excellent 1968 movie starred a dark green Mustang hatchback. The plot, tight and twisting, is mostly forgotten because it was overshadowed by a roaring car chase in which Lt. Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen, his macho charm at full throttle) speeds the Green Muscle Machine into a barreling pursuit of the bad guys’ car – it’s a mere “car” – through the not-ready-for-this streets of San Francisco.

That scene forced every cops movie made since, with the exception of anything by Agatha Christie, to attempt a wild, better-than-Bullitt car chase, the wilder, the more likely to sell movie tickets. As a result many potentially good-to-excellent cops movies spent so much time, energy and, you know, chrome on trying to top “Bullitt” that the remainders of the plots seemed to be afterthoughts.

When trying to beat “Bullitt’s” chase repeated its way to ho-hum cliché, the only blow-the-audiences’-minds option was amassing an amazing body count. A serial killer? That’s sure to be box-office bullion, right? Then, add in maxing up the brutality. How could a serial killer splattered in blood and body parts not go straight to the top?

However, once you’ve gone that far, who can one-up it?

Mo Hayder found a way in her debut novel, “Birdman.”

According to the dust-jacket photo, Hayder is a formidable English blonde, a Tower of London clad in black whose blurb, you’d think, should include mentions of at least a few appearances in night court: “After leaving school at fifteen, she worked as a barmaid, security guard, filmmaker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator, and teacher of English as a foreign language in Vietnam.”

Her colorful background suggests anything but what she wrote: a (mostly) orthodox British thriller.

You have your stock laconic, tortured (by a wacko childhood) detective, Jack Caffery; your cranky but soft-touch boss, Maddox; your free-spirited sidekick, Essex; your on-her-way-to-dumpville girlfriend, Veronica, whose departure is complicated by her cancer (or not); your lovely replacement girlfriend, Rebecca, whose arrival keeps getting delayed by, first, Veronica’s moping, then Jack’s blundering, then mayhem; and, oh yes, your serial killer (or “killers,” take your pick) of a half-dozen victims, all flawed women.

But with such standard fare, the book and the inevitable movie weren’t going to succeed in an already over-fevered fictional crime culture if the killer did nothing more than shoot or stab or even bludgeon the sad, drug-addicted strippers, oh no.

The killings here are accomplished by complicated drug injections, but even that was too tame. And if the killer were just a normal necrophiliac – and yes, I did write “normal necrophiliac” – again, are gore-seekers going to fill bookstores and theaters? No, something really special was necessary otherwise, who’s going to respond?

How about this: In each case, including, you know, normal necrophilia stuff, how about we have a slicing open of the victim’s chest, the insertion of one of the live “battered little zebra finches,” then a stitched-up incision, so the bird dies inside? (I can’t help myself: It’s killing two birds, with one sewn.)

The real crime here is that Hayder is an excellent writer, and she didn’t need the, um, overkill.

She has a sharp eye for imagery, making her seem less like the sweating-straining novice novelist and more like a playful conversationalist: “It was a bright blue day; the sun pulled out the sparkles in the new buildings along the Thames so they looked as if they were built from packed sugar.”

Her plot, with some spiffy detective work by Caffery and plenty of imaginative yet convincing cop foul-ups, kept things moving. Serial killings? Fine. Inventive fatal drug injections? Ye-e-e-eah, I’ll go along, the victims are drug abusers, so I see a connection.

But sewing birds into chests? It’s an outré plot device that prolongs the book by half-again, and I acknowledge, those 100 pages deliver some rewards. However, I would have settled for something simpler than rib-caged birds, maybe a “Bullitt”-style chase involving a phalanx of London’s lumpy red double-decker buses gallivanting through a droning House of Commons session while a cackling Boris Johnson, in flagger’s neon (matching his hair), waves a stop sign as he empties his AK-47.

Once the identify of he-who-sews-in-birds, the bloody Michelangelo of the portable saw, is revealed, the novel has to end, right? No, and the final chase – on foot; remember, McQueen ran under a Boeing 707 before “Bullitt’s” climax – takes too long, especially because the survivors are never in doubt. However, a couple of characters I was rooting for didn’t make it, and he-who-sews ends up with a pain in the neck, thus tormenting Caffery with a difficult moral decision, not what an already tormented cop needs.

You probably should pay no attention to my tamped-down enthusiasm.

In the ensuing 21 years since “Birdman” came out, Hayder has written six more Jack Caffery books, plus three non-Jacks, and every contemporary reference to her includes the adjective “best-selling,” so my opinion, in addition to being two decades too late to make a difference, probably no longer is applicable. If Mo Hayder has sold that many books, she has earned the right to ignore my quibbles, especially the ones about little pet birds.

She may not, however, have an equally easy time ignoring PETA.