I've been looking forward to 'Blood Circuit' for some time, not merely because I haven't read it in forever, but because, in the context of publication order, it feels like it was Guy's final resistance to being identified as just a horror author, a genre he never intended to become a home. The novels he wrote before he debuted in print weren't horror, 'Starlite' being a novel about a gamekeeper, 'Rebel Star' a footballing story and 'Dreamtime' science fiction. His first published book, 'Werewolf by Moonlight', was horror, but he followed it up with a set of porn digests, four Disney novelisations, a pair of thrillers and a war novel. Of his first twenty-one books, a mere seven, or only a third of them, could be counted as horror.

Sure, he then knocked out twenty horror novels on the trot, if we go by how they were labelled and marketed, but they weren't really all horror. Take the crabs out of 'Killer Crabs' and what's left is a pure thriller, which is pretty much what 'The Lurkers' was anyway, and a bunch of others are disaster novels with the horror aspect ramped up. In the background, the synopses he wrote that never made it to the writing stage were also often thrillers, especially 'Night of the Floods', which New English Library suggested he write as the follow up for his bestseller, 'Night of the Crabs', and its subsequent variants, all of which faded away before being written. It's pretty clear that, while he was good at writing horror, that isn't all he wanted to be known for.

So it made sense for him in 1983 to knock out a book that was written, published and identified down through the years as a thriller, but NEL clearly weren't fully committed to that premise. Sure, its spine reads "fiction" rather than "horror" but there aren't categories in the also-by list and, while there's little to suggest that it's another horror novel, there's little to suggest that it isn't either. The back cover blurb highlights "a chill fear", there's "death" in the tagline and the title is in traditional horror red. It also begins with a rather gruesome death, Craig Hammerton "baled into a pulped bloody square of flesh and bone", with a suggestion that it may be the latest example of the historical Hammerton Curse.

However, it proceeds firmly in thriller style. Hammerton was rich enough to own and run a motor racing team without a sponsor and his plans to race at Daytona now fall to his daughter, as his son was recently caught up in a drug smuggling scandal and then killed at Le Mans. Lee Hammerton takes up the mantle with vigour but, even though she has nightmares about the Hammerton Curse, she's convinced that their chief rival, Seamark, are out to get them. You see, Hammerton and Seamark had a joint catamaran cruise venture, years ago, that Seamark pulled out of before it became successful and he's held a grudge ever since.

So Lee hires Mark Slade as a consultant, meaning a cross between a private eye and a bodyguard. He knows a lot about the business, as a prominent driver who had come in second at Daytona by only half a length a year earlier, in a Seamark car. What Lee doesn't know is that the reason why he retired at the height of his fame is that he's lost his nerve. What we know, of course, is precisely how this is going to end even before we've read the book, because where else is that story going to go. Sure, he reiterates to her that he's not going to drive, but she soon persuades him to do a couple of laps on their test circuit and he promptly crashes, as someone's tampered with the tracking.

And so it begins and, while we know absolutely what Slade is going to end up doing in the final chapter, there are surprises here, ones which may explain why the book didn't succeed the way Guy had likely hoped. First is the fact that this is about American motorsport, so full of words like IROC, Riverside and Daytona that would have meant next to nothing to a British audience in 1983. The Hammerton team drive Chevy Camaros, just as little known in a country whose only commonplace American cars are Fords. What's strangest is that the folk who founded companies like Seamark and Hammerton were Formula 1 fans. It seems like an odd choice.

What's odder still is that this clearly wasn't written for an American audience, because most of it takes place in Hertfordshire. Initially, it's quintessential Smith, as Slade retires to the countryside to live in isolation, the old trope of the outsider clashing with the locals hinted at when he parks his car on a forestry road and can't be bothered to move it. Even in Hertfordshire, the home of the Hammerton estate and test circuit, we're still firmly in Smith country. Slade gets away from one of various attempts on his life by running across a field and hiding in a covert, where he's saved by gamekeepers with well-aimed shotguns.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, given that this is supposedly about American motorsports, we don't even get to America until page 160 of 216 and, even then, we quickly encounter a LAPD cop who brandishes a truncheon and tells Slade to "piss off!" That hardly seems authentic to me! What should be noted here is that the actual racing, as much as Smith clearly did his research on tyres and lubricants, hardly matters. It's hardly a focus at all, the twenty-four-hour race at Daytona that serves as the finalé wrapped up in under two chapters; which, I should add, also wrap up everything else, including unmasking the inside man and explaining his motives.

What truly matters is fighting back. Someone, obviously Seamark, wants Hammerton to fail and they're doing all they can to make that happen. Lee Hammerton has the grit to resist and she hires well when she brings on Mark Slade, who may have lost his nerve on the racetrack but only becomes more determined with every shot fired at him and every punch thrown. It shouldn't surprise too much, then, if this rather reminds of 'The Black Knights', the first of Smith's two 'Truckers' novels, merely with less overt intimidation and a far more deadly approach to sabotage.

Racing car driver Mark Slade is a more glamorous take on trucker Mike Britton and the man behind Seamark, whose first name I never caught, is just as obviously the man behind the sabotage as ever Marcus Wheeldon was only six years earlier in 'The Black Knights'. He merely stays behind the scenes, letting others do his dirty work for him instead of throwing his weight around at Britton's trucking company. The biggest difference is a case of numbers: the cast of characters here is notably smaller than 'The Black Knights', even though it's also twice as long. That gives Smith plenty of opportunity to build his characters somewhat so that we can hazard a guess or six as to who the inside man is and why.

'Blood Circuit' isn't a bad book but it feels like an ill-advised one that never quite figured out what it wants to be. If it was meant to be a British thriller in the vein of 'The Black Knights', it needed to ditch all the American angles and stay recognisably British. If it was meant to break Smith in the larger U.S. market, it needed to get to the States a lot sooner and spend a lot more time actually racing. If the mystery was key, maybe it ought to have had a few more characters and a few more red herrings. If the characters were key, then perhaps they're all a little too stereotypical to make the book work on their own.

All those things, along with the inconsistent marketing that makes this thriller appear a little like another horror novel, meant that this attempt by Smith to vary his output, failed and he wouldn't get another chance at New English Library. His next twenty-five novels wouldn't merely be horror, they would also be more emphatically horror than quite a few of his previous twenty, including a couple more 'Crabs' books, another 'Sabat', sequels to 'The Sucking Pit', 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' and a string of standalones, gradually shorter ones for NEL and an impressive set of thicker books for Sphere. Those would take him through to the nineties, when the changing market meant that he could finally diversify, writing thrillers, mysteries, children's books and even a western published in the U.S., a market he'd aimed at all his life. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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