Jake Arnott's 'Blood Rival' - a Modern Thriller With an Ancient Greek Twist

Award-winning novelist Jake Arnott joins Writer’s Voices to discuss his latest crime thriller, Blood Rival. Set in the 1980’s in Kent, England, Blood Rival centers around the death of the infamous gangster, Lee Royle, who is killed in a violent act of road rage. Following Lee’s death, his widow, Jo, her lover, Eddie (an adversary of Lee’s), and Commander Ray Spinks set out to uncover the truth of his mysterious passing. According to Arnott, “This book, it’s based on a classical Greek tragedy… I was familiar with the story because it’s quite a famous one. What struck me was the inciting incident of the whole story is what we call an incident of road rage, where, in the Greek story, it’s at a crossroads, these two men in chariots, one won’t give way to the other and a fight ensues… I took that incident that was actually quite a very famous incident of road rage that involved a kind of older gangster figure, quite a famous gang… in the real story he kills the younger man, but in my story I turn him on his head and so what then ensues is kind of a, it’s quite a gang land story, it’s a struggle for power but in the middle of it it’s also a story of forbidden love.”

Unlike other stories within this genre, Arnott’s heroes are not always virtuous. In fact, he believes that it is human imperfections that draw readers to the characters and it’s actually the villains, not the heroes, who make the story compelling. He noted, “…It’s also that reversal where somebody bad can redeem themselves or somebody good can fall from grace and I think it’s those sorts of stories that interest me… I think in a sense that’s one of the purposes of storytelling is that we follow things in stories that we wouldn’t necessarily want to happen to us, but we are curious to know how that affects the human condition… reading allows us to exercise our imagination and our empathy… when you read something you are actually entering into the mindset of somebody else and trying to imagine how you would feel in that situation.”