Mister Kreasey's Demon [Paperback]

Apart from what I thought were two minor minuses in the style, though this could be just me, I thought this was a gem of a storyline. In places I thought this was a bit too rich on description but I can't say it held up the plot which is what really kept me on board. The book delivers as a powerful and colourful character-driven story.
There's the bridging between older man, (teacher, Mr Kreasey) and younger woman (teenage student, Amy,) then there's the tension that the difference in social background provides. I don't like class words like working class and middle class, but these are differences which threaten the attraction that Kreasey and Amy find they have for each other in a danger-ridden narrative which otherwise threatens them both. Class divides and rags to riches themes have already been done brilliantly - but to death - by Catherine Cookson and Mister Kreasey's Demon, I have to say, has elements of these universal themes but...
From the start, Nickford's minute observation of character goes really deep and I soon felt involved. Coming back to the style, it is in places very detailed, no detail of setting or character overlooked if it heightens the character's individuality but, I suppose, it's this individuality that makes Raymond Nickford's style ultimately a refreshing break between the classics and best-sellers which can sometimes begin to tire with familiarity.

Matt Kreasey's humiliation at the hands of his streetwise London students conjured up for me the sheer rawness and edge which Nickford seems to achieve when he's observing his characters and, in this book, we have teenage students taking a sensitive paranoid teacher apart like a pack of wolves. When you expect that Matt would be reduced to hatred of those that taunt and threaten him, you still see a side of him which is, like many of Nickford's characters in his other novels, really tender.

Matt becomes fascinated by his young student, Amy, who in turn sees in him, not just an older man and her teacher, but the vulnerability of a man who it's true to say is a 'gentle' man. The interest might have ended here but the way Nickford explores the relationship leaves no compromise with false sentiment, nothing Mills and Boon, just honest emotion that really drew me into the story from the start.

Amy becomes Kreasey's 'passport' to the toughies who resent his closeness to her. Teachers are to be ground down to a pulp if they dare, like him, to give a lesson on 'Marvel and the Metaphysical poets' or try to bridge the gap between village teacher and some of the malcontents among inner-London backstreet students. But Amy brings to his flat more than her overdue essay and Nickford's observation of the relationship between a poor teenage girl from a deprived background, trying to help him cope with increasing paranoia, and a middle-class teacher from a quiet village, is masterfully done.

In places, I thought the tension almost too sustained. You need moments of calm, even if it's mental calm in a narrative to relieve the tension but for those who want to bite off the ends of their fingernails while getting some very raw character observation, this is a book to be swallowed whole.

The tension is ratcheted up as, just when you think Matt and Amy, teacher and student, are going to get through the ordeal, Kreasey's paranoia darkens his feelings for her and makes him wonder whether she, too, could be one of those voices he hears as he revisits the corridors of the empty college buildings at night to try to come to terms with the demons that keep him on Diazepam.

The night-time scenes in the dimmed and empty classrooms lit only by the glow of an orange neon lamp from the street outside and the taunting 'appearances' of chief bully 'Thickneck' and his sycophants let us right into the mind of a paranoid and I thought this is so well done that it's as chilling as the threat of the hunting knife that's coming for Kreasey.

What made me read to the end was to find out whether Kreasey would survive - not so much the knife or the collective beating - but his demons and, most of all, the one chance at love that could elude him.

Twists in the Tale (Psychological Suspense, the Supernatural and Ghosts S.)

You have to adjust to an unusual style but after the first chapter its precisely the newness of the voice that was key to what made me want to keep with the characters. Kreasey the sensitive, perhaps hyper-sensitive teacher, reduced to a husk of a being by his street-hardened students, is one of the best portraits I've ever found outside those teachers I knew when I was a student and some of the description rings chillingly true. When village teacher Mister Kreasey finds his teenage student, Amy, his only 'passport' to the hard urban world that his students inhabit, he moves clumsily into a romance with her and yet is constantly haunted by the outside suspicion that even Amy could be one of those who are planning his ultimate humiliation.
Enough has already been said in the book description about the storyline but what I would add is that often the minor characters are so unforgettable as individuals. I can't get out of my mind Amy Carter's seduction of the simple and stuttering giant of a lad, Philip, albeit in a disused railway carriage in a railway siding. Philip, being the only male student amongst all the others in Mr Kreasey's classes who trusts and admires Kreasey for his sensitivity and kindness, places a further strain on the relationship that has grown between Mister Kreasey and Amy as loyalties are divided, and Kreasey feels gutted by the seduction of his simpleton friend tricked and boozed up on cherry brandy by Amy.
Sometimes the characters stole so much of my attention that I missed some of the twists and turns and though the storytelling is good, it was the characters who made this book stand out.

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