This is a guest post by Richard:

A SCENT OF NEW-MOWN HAY was the first of twenty-eight enviro-thrillers/science-factions/quasi-horror novels – call them what you will – that the prolific English author John Blackburn produced between 1958 and 1985. If those descriptions seem uncertain or ambiguous then it is because Blackburn’s work is notoriously difficult to categorise. He specialised in literary hybrids. What in today’s parlance would be termed genre mash-ups. Stories that commenced in one fictional field would frequently absorb elements from others. The result, as often as not, was a mutation that bore little correlation with any of its propagators.

If even classifying Blackburn’s work is difficult, then reviewing it presents additional problems. His novels often depend upon a startling, singular, and usually morbidly fascinating, idea which it would utterly ruin the prospective reader’s enjoyment to reveal. A SCENT OF NEW-MOWN HAY defies both easy definition and spoiler free analysis.

Suffice it to say, it commences upon the lines of a conventional espionage thriller with the murder of a spy. Something sinister is occurring in the remote fastnesses of northern Russia. Something which the Soviet authorities are determined should not be known about. Their increasingly desperate efforts to suppress information about it escalates into an international incident when a Soviet vessel inadvertently rams and sinks a British cargo ship.

In London, General Kirk, the head of Foreign Office Intelligence, fears the Soviets are landing manned military satellites. A rather quaint paranoia to encounter now, but an understandable fear then, considering that the book was published in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik.

Attention then shifts to the novel’s other leading protagonists. An attractive couple by the names of Tony and Marcia Heath. Tony is a biologist, slumming it in a teaching job at a northern university, having relinquished a research post at a government facility called Farhill. While Marcia is …?  well, we never learn anything much about Marcia’s background. And this presents certain narrative difficulties which I will return to.

We are also introduced to Tony’s superior; a seedy figure called Roberts, who lives in a dilapidated house with his simple daughter. And with this the book draws in the trappings of a mystery novel. For we are informed that women have been disappearing in the vicinity. Add to that the sudden appearance of Tony’s former colleague from Farhill, Dr Hearn, requesting his help, and the stage is set for a drama that turns rapidly into a race to prevent nothing less than the extinction of humanity.

And that marks the boundary of plot specifics without venturing into spoiler territory. Except to add that the central conceit is a remarkable one, and singularly horrible. And one which serves to demonstrate that Blackburn’s morbid imagination and fecund powers of ghastly invention were fully developed before ever he put pen to paper on this his first novel.

Regrettably the same does not hold true for his storytelling skills. The plot has so many holes in it that one can be forgiven for believing it attacked by moths. And while I make no claim to be someone scientifically erudite, its contentions in that area come across as being as easy to swallow as a Plutonium biscuit. [Can specimens mutated by radiation really be ‘un-mutated’ by counter radiation? I would be delighted to be assured that they can.]

The book boasts several compelling vignettes and set-pieces, but the narrative threads linking them together are unconvincing. The story deviates down too many blind alleys, and there is an over reliance on artifice and coincidence. Courses of action are decided upon after intense brainstorming sessions with no indication provided of the thought processes that delivered their conclusions. In one particularly egregious instance, a long missing character is located solely because of an outrageous hunch.

The worst plot contrivance is delivered by Marcia. She provides the authorities with a crucial name that could only have come from classified documents, with no explanation offered of how she could know it. To compound the absurdity, she confers with a journalist, who similarly professes knowledge he cannot possibly possess. Not only that, but he does not question her out-of-the-blue interest in such a clandestine subject. Nor pursue it, even with international tensions boiling over. Such examples of abbreviated storytelling do not merely strain credulity. They put it in traction.

A peculiarity of finding such narrative shortcomings stems from the fact that the book was first published as part of Secker & Warburg’s Knockout Thriller range. This was a series that prided itself on credibility. The publisher declaiming: “Whatever feats of endurance or powers of deduction are exhibited by the characters, they must be such that real human beings can, in emergencies, be expected to command them.” So confident were they of their series’ conformance with plausibility that they offered a free book to anyone who could persuade them where a given title had compromised the criterion.

A SCENT OF NEW-MOWN HAY remains the book for which Blackburn is best known. It has repeatedly demonstrated an impressive publishing pedigree over the years. It was first issued in paperback by Penguin, before being reissued by Brown & Watson and then by New English Library. NEL was still publishing it in the late 1970s when it was packaged with a striking Tim White cover. In more recent years it has received the deluxe limited-edition treatment from Centipede Press. As well as being included in Valancourt Books extensive programme of Blackburn reissues.

The book’s success is indisputable. Its status as an accomplished work of fiction is far more debatable. Yet the gruesome power of its central idea has never diminished. And it remains a page turner. At the end of the day, what further qualification does a thriller really need?