Acts of Violence - Ryan David Jahn

Ryan David Jahn’s first novel is based around the notorious real-life murder of Kitty Genovese (one also fictionalised in a short story by Harlan Ellison, The Whimper of Whipped Dogs), the author here however using it as the central incident to examine the lives of a number of what was reported to be 38 people who witnessed the crime and failed to do anything about it. What could possibly be going on in the lives of these people that it is too much trouble to even lift a phone when a woman is attacked outside her house? Acts of Violence manages, in a pulp-fiction manner that is entirely appropriate to the setting and the period, to depict the feverish mindsets of a range of characters whose only thing in common would seem to be that they are all in the same neighbourhood and all of them are living in fear or despair.

Taking in loners contemplating suicide, alcoholism, unhappy marriages in crisis, child abuse, sordid scenes of adultery and wife-swapping, people living in ill-health, corrupt cops, hit-and-run traffic incidents and a couple of grisly murders, the novel doesn’t let up on the bleakness and misery of sad lives with no outlook or prospects of improvement. Things it seems can only get worse, and in Acts of Violence they often do. There’s a certain naivety in the simplicity of the writing and storytelling, particularly in the structure, which contrives to have one incident lead on or into to the next, glimpsed from one dark room of an apartment block complex into the lighted room of another where another torrid scene is taking place, the situations summed-up with over-explanatory, over-heated narrative and expositional dialogue. On the other hand, it’s entirely appropriate for the pulp-writing style of the book which is very reminiscent of Cornell Woolrich in its setting and the Rear Window-style look into the dark secrets and sordid goings-on of other people’s lives.

The flowing ensemble is a difficult thing to pull-off, particularly in the thin pulp crime-fiction influenced situations that are presented here, the reader expecting - not unreasonably since it is based on a real-life incident - to have more fully rounded characters and motivations than can be achieved within a couple of pages that flit from one bleak scene to the next. There is however a tremendous force that is achieved by the gradual accumulation of incidents that occur over the course of one long, violent night, all in close proximity to one another, making Acts of Violence a powerful and grimly readable crime-fiction debut.