Book Review: Sweet Jimmy by Bryan Brown
I think I have the same issue with Sweet Jimmy that I had with Tom Hanks’s Uncommon Type. Am I judging Sweet Jimmy too harshly because Bryan Brown is a well-known actor? Or am I not judging it harshly enough because it was written by him… Mmm…
I didn’t realise until I started reading this that it is actually a collection of short stories. If I was Brown’s editor, I would have quickly advised him to ditch this idea and just go with a full length novel. He could have, I’d say, easily spliced some of the stories together to fit in with the longer format. In fact, I think this might be my biggest beef with Sweet Jimmy – all the stories seemed the same.
Each story featured a gritty crime and fit into the same [thriller] genre. Actually, I feel like I need to almost give some sort of warning if you’re thinking of reading – a lot of the stories are quite graphic.
All the lead characters were very similar too. Mostly they were the quintessential 70s or 80s (see below re the time setting) Australian male, I suppose we’d call them larrikins back in the day. And, kind of creepily, if the stories were to be translated to the screen, it was easy to imagine the leads could almost all be played by Bryan Brown.
I had to wonder when Brown wrote these stories. I don’t think any of the plots, characters’ behaviour or dialogue seemed to fit into a present day 2023 time setting. Through the editing process it would have been nice for someone to have helped Brown out by modernising a few things maybe.
His second offering is a full length novel. Maybe that will work better for me. This one, 2 ½ out of 5
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