Carver Goes for Blood

Beginning today in my other blog, The Rap Sheet, I’m posting--in three parts, over three successive days--a never-before-seen short story called “Bloodsport.” It’s the work of Tom Cain, the pseudonymous British author who has won praise for his thrillers, including the new UK release, Assassin.

Like those novels, “Bloodsport” stars the very shadowy figure Samuel Carver. Cain describes the plot of this first-ever Carver short story this way:

Samuel Carver is an angry man. The protagonist of The Accident Man, The Survivor, and Assassin, whose specialty is creating deniable assassination by means of unattributable “accidents,” has just discovered that one of his former brother officers in the SBS (Special Boat Service) has been killed in Afghanistan. The man died very horribly and painfully in the hands of the Taliban, lost for want of the helicopter that should have airlifted him to safety.

Suddenly, a situation that has long been a matter of principled outrage to Carver has become very personal. So he reacts in the way that he knows best. He decides to make a bad thing happen to what he believes is a bad person; the person he holds responsible for the death of his friend and many other fine soldiers, the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In the tradition of Rogue Male and The Day of the Jackal, Carver stalks his prey. In this case he does not choose the boulevards of Paris as his hunting ground, nor the hills and forests of Germany. Instead he goes to the hills of northern England, where the prime minister is taking his summer holiday.

Click here to read the opening installment of “Bloodsport,” along with Cain’s disclaimer. And click here to enjoy UK journalist Ali Karim’s interview with the author, which includes some background on “Bloodsport.”