Just Another Angel
First Published: 1988
Published By: Collins
Angel Number: 1
Personal Favourite: 12
Quotable Quote: Women - trouble? Gee, if only I'd known that earlier in life.
The Backstory
Introducing Fitzroy Maclean Angel in his debut adventure. Thirty-something Roy earns the rent and cat food in various ways: some straight, some crooked, some in between.
The errand he agrees to run for a blonde and beautiful 'acquaintance' seems straightforward enough, until he finds himself involved in dodgy money, a gangland family and, even worse, an all-female protest group.
The Webmaster's Take
The good old days of one night stands: you either got the girl pregnant or, as Squeeze would call it, "a nasty little rash", or you got aggravation from various parties threatening to remove popular parts of your body in a violent fashion. Sometimes from the person you slept with.
Angel, of course, has to be just that little bit different. Not only is it not, technically, a one night stand, more a one (very early) morning stand, add the fact she is married to someone who has a BA degree in GBH, and he ends up agreeing to run an errand for her; which considering this involves crossing a picket line on an all-female protest group, he may have hoped for a safer project: dodging mercenary bullets in Afghanistan, for example.
This, of course, is the first of the official Angel series. When the book came out, I was nearly 18. I don't remember what I was reading at the time, and no, I'm not going to say that I wished that I had known about them sooner, I seriously doubt I would have appreciated them in my teen years, and would have probably given up on them fairly soon after. Mine was the right age to find them: thirty-something. However, because Just Another Angel was read later than all but two in the series (three if you count the latest one), it has ended up on my personal favourite list very low indeed.
And I really hate myself for it.
I keep trying to find a home for it a little further up the list, but feel a certain loyalty to the books read earlier and have to consider if there are any that I would push lower. And the answer, so far, is always no. Maybe one day, when I've read it the same number of times as That Angel Look I may find, say, that I like it better than Bootlegged. Ugh. Time to stop dwelling on it.
The book was named after a line in a Dire Straits song: I suspect this was Expresso Love rather than Romeo and Juliet, (though they were on the same album) but until last year was probably one of the most difficult of the Angels to get hold of. Praise be it was re-released with the other two, subsequent novels in 2007, with forewords from the author giving valuable insight into how they came into being.
I still maintain that Angel's true personality didn't develop until Arms, but this was the birthplace of a classic PI series.
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