PETIT, Chris 1949-

PERSONAL:

Born 1949, in England.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England. Office—British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 195 Piccadilly, London W1V 9LG, England.

CAREER:

Time Out, London, England, former film editor and critic. Director of films, including Radio On, 1979; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1981; Flight to Berlin, 1983; Chinese Boxes, 1984; Radio on Remix (short), 1998; and Dead TV (short), 1999. Director of television movies, including The Falconer, 1998; and Asylum, 2000. Director of television documentaries, including Negative Space, 1999; and London Orbital, 2002.

WRITINGS:

Robinson, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

The Psalm Kller: A Novel, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

Back from the Dead, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

The Hard Shoulder, Granta (London, England), 2001.

The Human Pool, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Also author of screenplays, including Radio On, 1979; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1981; Flight to Berlin, 1983; Chinese Boxes, 1984; Radio on Remix, 1998; The Falconer, 1998; Dead TV, 1999; and Asylum, 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

When filmmaker Chris Petit tried his hand at novel writing in the early 1990s, it was no surprise that his books followed close on the stylistic and thematic heels of his films: thrillers, rich with dark atmosphere, that toy with death and sexuality, and are often wrapped in deconstructionalist experimentation.

Petit's debut novel was not technically a crime thriller, but was draped in plenty of noir. Robinson grimly follows an unnamed narrator as he encounters, and is subsequently fascinated by and drawn down into the underworld of Robinson, a magnetic and self-destructive Soho "entrepreneur." The book contains plenty of vice and seedy trappings, but Giles Foden in the Times Literary Supplement felt "this mesmerizing novel has something very black to say about freedom and self-worth; it shows up monsters—pornography, drugs, technology—sapping the force of human will." Foden added that Petit finds some joy in all of it: "a perverse pleasure in losing oneself, a willful desensitization of the will." Petit also lays on the cinematic and literary style in his prose, causing Janet Barron of New Statesman & Society to state that Robinson "reads as if Dylan Thomas and Hunter S. Thompson had gone on a binge together," with Barron later tossing both Kingsley and Martin Amis into the referential mix.

Petit's next book, The Psalm Killer, embraces the thriller genre more directly as it tells the story of a Belfast serial killer working amid conflict between the Irish and British in the mid-1980s, murdering people on both the IRA and British sides of the conflict. A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that Petit's "knack for suspenseful plotting and a gritty evocation of Belfast and its intersecting underworlds make for a hard-hitting political thriller," and Kathleen Hughes of Booklist found the book to be "engrossing" and "superbly written."

The Psalm Killer was followed with Back from the Dead, another thriller. This time Petit crosses the Atlantic to America, and for background he trades the British/Irish conflict for the world of rock and roll celebrity. Of course sex, drugs, and murder remain on center stage as a moonlighting NYPD detective is hired to guard an aging rock star; the celebrity has been receiving ominous love letters from a girl he watched die fifteen years earlier. Joanne Wilkinson found Back from the Dead "unpredictable and haunting." Christopher Atamian of the New York Times suggested that though Back from the Dead "begins in a lackluster manner, it slowly lures you into its complicated and abstruse web."

In The Human Pool an aging former American OSS agent finds his past undercover spy work in Nazi Germany coming back to haunt him. Meanwhile, a British investigative journalist digs into modern-day neo-Nazis for a documentary, and it is not long before the two men find themselves paired up to battle a dark military-industrial conspiracy. Ronnie H. Terpening in Library Journal appreciated Petit's "seamless and intricate weaving of past and present, and of characters real and fictional."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 1993, Eloise Kinney, review of Robinson, p. 738; March 1, 1997, Kathleen Hughes, review of The Psalm Kller, p. 1069; February 15, 2001, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Back from the Dead, p. 1120.

Economist, July 15, 2000, review of Back from the Dead, p. 3.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2001, review of Back from the Dead, p. 136; August 1, 2002, review of The Human Pool, pp. 1068-1069.

Library Journal, April 1, 1997, Marylaine Block, review of The Psalm Killer, p. 130; October 1, 2002, Ronnie H. Terpening, review of The Human Pool, p. 129.

New Statesman & Society, June 11, 1993, Janet Barron, review of Robinson, p. 41.

New York Times, March 18, 2001, Christopher Atamian, review of Back from the Dead.

Publishers Weekly, December 6, 1993, review of Robinson, p. 55; March 17, 1997, review of The Psalm Killer, p. 78; February 19, 2001, review of Back from the Dead, p. 69; October 7, 2002, review of The Human Pool, p. 54.

Spectator, November 30, 1996, Nick Dent, review of The Psalm Killer, p. 52-3.

Times Literary Supplement, December 6, 1996, C.L. Dallat, review of The Psalm Killer, p. 22; June 11, 19993, Giles Foden, review of Robinson, p. 21; January 28, 2000, Theo Tait, review of Back from the Dead, p. 21.

ONLINE

BookReporter.com,http://www.bookreporter.com/ (September 5, 2001), Joe Hartlaub, review of Back from the Dead.*