Just Finished Reading: Three Miles by Robert Dinsdale (FP: 2011) [229pp] 

Leeds, 1940. It was Watchman Captain Abraham Matthews’ lucky night. He had finally caught up with Albie Crowe, a small-time thief and hoodlum with big ideas. Now came the hard part – taking him across the city to the Station House to deal with him. But that simple task was going to be anything but simple, especially tonight. The Station was three miles away. It might as well be three hundred. Handcuffed to Albie the Captain would need to navigate across a blacked out and ruined landscape, avoid the bombs being dropped by the Luftwaffe and evade Albie’s gang who were sure to try and free him. Those three miles were not just going to be tough going. It was going to be three miles through Hell itself. 

I had hopes for this one. On the face of it it’s a great idea. We have a compact area to traverse under extreme circumstances, we have a fraught ‘relationship’ between the two main characters, we have a time element and a chase. Tension would, I thought, be the watchword here. Plus, naturally, we have the element of random death and destruction from the air. Pretty good, yeah? Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me. I should’ve got my first clue from the cover. Now I’m aware that covers are put together by the publishers who probably farm them out to a graphics company to do the work. So, I’m not exactly expecting them to accurately reflect the contents. Here though, they did – unfortunately. The keen eyed among you will notice an aircraft in the top right-hand corner along with the barrage balloons. It’s a JU-87 ‘Stuka’ dive-bomber designed primarily as a close air support light bomber for use in attacking entrenched positions and hard points which are preventing the ground forces (and especially tanks) from moving forward. It is NOT, generally, used for attacking cities. More specifically this is LEEDS we’re talking about. Now, true the Stuka was used (early on) to attack convoys in the English Chanel as well as ground installations on the English South coast (like the RADAR stations so important in the Battle of Britain) but these are SHORT range machines. The JU-87 had a range of around 220 miles. So, how exactly could they fly to LEEDS and back again to their home bases? They would either have to fly half way up England from bases in France or over the North Sea from bases in Norway – both of which are WAY outside their range. Plus, the JU-87 was withdrawn from attacks on the UK mainland in August 1940 after proving that they could not operate in contested skies. So... repeated mention of ‘Stukas’ in the text were both annoying, sloppy and broke the emersion in the story. [RANT Over!] 

But I think my bigger problem was with the ‘tone’ of the story which read (to me at least) more like a fable than actual historical fiction. I understand that both of the characters saw themselves in a ‘fantastic’ story-book mold as heroes in an epic struggle but I think the author took things too far and strayed much further from reality than (in MY opinion at least) he should have. A straight telling of the events of the evening – minus the Stuka bombers! - would’ve been much better. Needless to say, I spent much (too much) of my time consciously *reading* a story rather than being ‘inside’ the narrative. This was despite the fact that, overall, it wasn’t that badly written. It was, again for me, the fact that the tone seemed to repeatedly clash with the story itself. So, although the book was reasonable, I can’t honestly recommend it. 

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