Title: Snow Job
Author: Donal James Black
Publisher: LMH Publishing Limited.
Reviewer: Mel Cooke
INITIALLY, I was in a bit of a quandary in summing up Donal James Black's Snow Job. The author, who was born on June 9, 1924, is now dead and I have been grown up to respect my elders as well as have a healthy regard for the saying 'don't speak ill of the dead'.
Then, I thought, any writer worth her or his scribblings would welcome an honest review during or after their lifetime. And, since literature lives forever the text is very much alive and can be spoken well or ill of. I pressed on.
Snow Job is an adventure tale about a cocaine trans-shipment plot disguised as a transcontinental race between a B-17 bomber (more popularly known as the 'Flying Fortress') and an Avro Lancaster, going from New York down to the Falkland Islands and back up the west coast of South America.
Recreating rivalry
Recreating the World War II rivalry between the United States Air Force and Royal Air Force (RAF) respectively, the pair of two-person teams (plot conceptualiser Joe Murphy and Paddy Christie in the Fortress, our hero Dave Stuart with female sizzler, Jo Robinson, in the Lancaster), whip up a flurry of media interest with their open jibing and plane disabling tricks.
By the end of Black's foreword I had decent expectations of Snow Job, not only because of the graphic nature of the paragraph which struck me but the good enough imagination it showed. Black writes about "people who laugh at a man's torn-out heart, lying on the ground at an illegal airstrip in Colombia, pumping and pulsing uselessly, the body it had been in, already dead".
It also did not hurt that he opens chapter one, entitled 'A Voice From the Past', with "I was recording some commercials at Radio Jamaica when the call came in."
Great, I thought. Home, lovely home factors in. But the 25 mostly very short chapters of Snow Job (which has 142 pages, plus a prologue and an epilogue) did not turn out to be great.
Halfway through, I finally put my finger on a niggling thought which had been with me from about chapter two. The book reads like an adult version of the 'Hardy Boys' detective series - short chapters, light dialogue, not much emphasis on plot development or superb use of language.
A rare exception to the last comes when Black writes about our intrepid quartet and their behemoth aircraft coming into Jamaica. Here, the transplanted Scotsman and ex-RAF serviceman's love for a country he lived in from 1958-1979 is evident. He writes:
"If you've ever flown into Jamaica in daylight, you know how beautiful it looks. Even flying into Kingston - the sprawling, noisy, hot and crowded capital - is impressive, because of the enormous harbour, the long, snake-like winding length of the Palisadoes Peninsula and the Blue Mountains that tower over the whole scene.
"But Montego Bay is something else again. As you lose altitude on your approach to the airport, the ocean gets rapidly shallower, its colours change from deepest, darkest indigo to lighter blues, and all kinds of greens and yellow and pinks, then finally the dazzling white sand of Doctor's Cave Beach as you whiz past it just before touchdown. The sea sparkles at you, and the hills go rolling away upward from the beaches toward the mysterious Cockpit country."
Sex scenes
Not bad at all. But far from enough to make Snow Job a worthwhile read, although as it takes the reader on a multiple hop and skip through the various landings and take-offs, it does offer a decent armchair trip.
The numerous sex scenes (mostly in-flight) between Dave Stuart and a dazzling, younger Jo do not have the details that would make them really interesting, even though the setting of the first is excellent. On an early trip over the ocean, Jo asks if he is familiar with "the seven minutes", puts the Lancaster on auto-pilot for a long, shallow dive and they have at it, Stuart pulling out one stick and pulling back on another with the bomber very close to the water.
Even at the point where they take on the cocaine in Colombia, and a rival gang tries to disrupt the shipment, only to be repulsed (violently, of course) and the heart-on-the-ground scenario unfolds, the lack of detailing makes it less than a heart-racer.
So Dave Stuart ends up in love, the Snow Job ends up in Miami and, incongruously, one plane (with Jo and Joe on board) is shot down by a World War II fighter plane, even as the US DEA informs them by radio that they are on to the plot and order them to land.
There is more, but what is an extra light flake or two?
