The Lizard by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
Review by Gary Kaill
A young Scottish student finds himself caught up in a twisted murder plot on a Greek island in this gripping debut
Pity poor Alistair Halston: the hapless student at the centre of this compelling crime debut. No sooner has he bet the farm on a solo jaunt to the Cyclades Islands in an ill-considered attempt to win back Ellie, the ex-girlfriend who dumped him for his exhausting niceness (‘You rely on me and it’s weighing me down’—ouch), than a drunken encounter on the ferry to his first island stop finds him no longer in possession of his traveller’s cheques or his passport. Skata.
Seasoned readers, of course, will have predicted Halston’s undoing a handful of pages in: specifically, from the moment he consents to the overtures of Ricky, the charismatic Australian leader of a gang of hard-partying misfits travelling from the port of Piraeus. By the time he finds himself unexpectedly successful in their game of quarters, and roped into a virtual deck-top orgy, even readers new to the twists and turns of crime fiction will be urging the poor lad to get back to his book with a quiet coffee and a slice of spanokopita.
Alas, waking blearily in Parikia, the bustling port capital of the island of Paros, with only the vaguest memory of the events that led him here, is only the start of Halston’s trouble. From there on in, a series of seemingly unrelated events see his predicament worsen. As he starts to recover the situation, finding casual labour with the help of fellow Scot Roland, first-time author Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, here stepping aside from his acting career, deftly begins the long, slow process of spinning a web designed to catch both his unwitting protagonist and reader—with barely a hint of the bigger picture developing alongside.
Just when Halston appears to have been saved by the bell, with accommodation (after a fashion: a goat hut) and cash in his pocket, his plans for moving on and continuing the search for Ellie are shattered. Fired for reasons unclear, and the hut rifled, all seems lost: ‘I was fucked,’ our narrator concludes. Quite.
But then, with eyebrow-raising timing, up pops Ricky, who, it seems, has been looking for Halston ever since he disappeared on the ferry for ‘a tactical vom’. Desperate times call for desperate measures, sure enough, and it’s a wily move on Bruce-Lockhart’s part to run his protagonist absolutely into the ground before pitching him full-pelt into the action. It’s a hard-faced reader who doesn’t side with a patsy in it this deep.
As he finds himself taking up Ricky’s offer of house-sitting a luxury villa, and then slipping into the lucrative task of helping secure ‘life models’ for the villa’s shadowy owner, Heinrich, (‘I didn’t see it as pimping’) it takes just one more episode of unthinking abandon - this time, a party at the villa whose excesses would have given Nero pause - for Halston to wake up alone and the place deserted. Again. As he shuffles around the villa, trying to piece together the events of the night before, he finds himself pursued by the police, incarcerated, and charged with murder.
And that’s all within the first hundred pages. The Lizard is a breathless race to uncover the truth behind an ever-darkening mystery—a real jaw-to-the-floor rollercoaster. Credit to Bruce-Lockhart for managing an increasingly complex assemblage of plot strands, grand set-pieces, and some smartly unveiled twists. But this debut is more than just the sum of its logistical parts. By the time Halston begins to take control of his own destiny (it’s no spoiler to reveal that the second part of the novel, with Halston on the run, shifts setting to allow for just that), the narrative is enriched with the character development required to support its whizz-bang pacing. Our once meek bystander, chooses - and begins to relish - fight rather than flight; it’s a narrative decision that serves the novel well.
Credit, of course, for the deeply atmospheric setting. A crying shame that the global pandemic has nixed the unique and heady pleasures of Greek island-hopping for so many this year (despite the government’s expert handling of the crisis), for, if ever there was a book crying out to be grabbed at the airport and devoured on a Greek beach with a chilled Alfa in hand, The Lizard is surely it. As the Cyclades become increasingly crucial to the labyrinthine plot, pursuer and pursued darting from one to the next in a game of high stakes hopscotch, with real-life settings (bars, restaurants, beaches) forming a dizzying backdrop, The Lizard emerges as a twisted, thrilling travelogue of sorts.
With that in mind, the book’s violent episodes will do little, you suspect, to deter those curious to venture to the islands for the first time—Bruce-Lockhart brings his setting to life so vividly, you need only close your eyes to smell the bougainvillea, taste the dolmades. But, true to its name, The Lizard is a cold-blooded thing— monstrous and sly, and not quite done with you even as you turn the last page. Be careful with this one—it’s a beast.
The Lizard by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart is published 28/4/20