Certainly it's easy enough to find fault with ''Past Caring'' - Mr. It also turns out, as the reader only gradually realizes, that Martin is himself a somewhat disreputable fellow whose modest self-portrait conceals dark secrets of his own.Ī nominee for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize last year, Robert Goddard's first novel combines the expert suspense-manipulation skills of a Daphne du Maurier romance with those of a John le Carre thriller.

As it turns out, of course, he is both - a student of history whose biographical research leads him into a sordid tangle of death and betrayal. London, that grey month of March, seemed to echo my self-pity.''įor all the Chandleresque echoes of his speech, Martin Radford initially seems more like one of Simon Grey's bedraggled academics than a tough-guy private eye capable of unraveling a nasty series of murders. ''THE spring of 1977,'' says Robert Goddard's hero by way of introduction, ''found me, newly past thirty, a bad case of wasted talent in a largely waste city - an unemployed, divorced ex-schoolteacher of foundered promise and dismal prospect.

Past Caring by Robert Goddard