THE ACCIDENT MAN by Tom Cain

12:23 by Eoin McNamee

SHOULD MOHAMED Al Fayed turn literary publisher, then expect these two books to be among his top titles. If the outpouring of national grief a decade ago on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was lasting, one might expect both to be scorned by the reading public as bad taste.

Yet the publishers’ have jumped on the anniversary bandwagon with dollar signs dancing in their eyes, trailing conspiracy theories as long as the Royal Train.

In The Accident Man it is the good guy who is accidentally conned into doing the dirty deed, killing the Princess by flashing a light into the eyes of her driver, under the assumption that the passenger is an Islamic terrorist.

Carver realises the con only when there is an attempt to kill him immediately afterwards while he himself has unwittingly booby-trapped the flat of his would-be killers. A nice, neat, no-witness job.

Naturally, he survives, setting the scene for wham-bam murder and mayhem which pinpoints an evil Russian oligarch, a breed fast becoming “the usual suspects”. It is a high-octane, boys-with-toys romp, awash with jargon, lovingly detailed machinery and luscious leggy blondes. It has been optioned for the cinema by Paramount and may make a better action movie than it does a book.

In sharp contrast is Eoin McNamee’s 12:23, subtitled Paris, 31st August 1997. McNamee’s style is finely wrought, quasi-poetic and perhaps overambitious.

It exhibits, as he might put it, a driven desperation to encapsulate the universal in a flicked-away fictional fag end. This boy needs an editor with an iron fist. That said, he can really write and has a deft ear for dialogue, especially the cadences of his native Northern Ireland. McNamee has a better claim than most to be heir to John le Carré as master of the genuinely literary thriller, if only he could acquire just a little English understatedness.

His Paris in that August is a place of dark bars, secretly observed encounters in the Bois de Boulogne, where two veterans of Ulster’s Troubles are thrown in amid forces they are ill-equipped to deal with.

Both books involve the mysterious white Fiat observed at the scene of the accident but whereas in The Accident Man it is brushed off as incidental, here it is, more convincingly, an integral part of the plot.

THE ACCIDENT MAN by Tom Cain

Bantam, £12.99; 416pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

12:23 by Eoin McNamee

Faber, £12.99; 304pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

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