White Knight, Black Swan

The story

Jardine, known to nearly everyone as Bimbo, is a very large man in a line of work that suits large men. He works as a bouncer and collects debts for Reardon, a gangster in working-class 1980s London, and by the standards of that trade he is good at it. He is also kind, and people sense it. Women and children trust him on sight, he keeps an eye on the lonely and the vulnerable around him, and in the park there is a solitary black swan he would dearly like to find a mate for.

His friends are an unlikely set. Adrian runs a massage parlour. An elderly Jewish antique dealer is teaching him chess. Stan runs a video shop. Esther, a neighbour, owes him her life after an overdose, and Sherry is a girl he knew at school. When an Irish heavy starts demanding protection money from Adrian, Bimbo steps in and deals with him in the only way he knows. Only afterwards does he learn that the Irishman is on Reardon's payroll too.

That one decent act puts him on the wrong side of the man who pays him. What follows escalates quickly. People are killed, loyalties turn out to be for sale, and secrets that some of the players buried a long time ago begin to surface. Bimbo has to work out how far a man in his trade can go in protecting people before the trade comes for him, and for the people he has been trying to shield. Gemmell keeps the action close to Bimbo's own patch, among the clubs he works and the flats and shops of his friends, and the book's sympathies are never in doubt.

Reading notes

This was the only novel Gemmell published outside fantasy in his lifetime, and he did it under a pen name, Ross Harding. Arrow published it in 1993, and The Times noted in its obituary that it was the one novel of his that never became a bestseller. It then stayed out of print for a quarter of a century, until Gollancz reissued it under Gemmell's own name in 2017, re-edited and with the title styled White Knight/Black Swan.

Bimbo Jardine will be familiar to anyone who knows the fantasies. The huge man with a gentle streak and a code he will not bend is close kin to Druss, and one reviewer spotted early versions of both Druss and Jon Shannow in him. Gemmell had worked as a nightclub bouncer before journalism, and the London of doors, debts and small businesses feels observed rather than researched.

As a crime novel it is modest: a straightforward gangland thriller that relies more on its hero's decency than on plotting, with one reviewer calling it an enjoyable read with an insight into criminal life. It matters more as a Gemmell book than as a contribution to the genre. Fantasy readers should know that there is no magic in it at all. Read it after several of the fantasies, when the echoes will mean something.