I wasn't sure what to expect from a book by an actress best remembered for appearing in Hi-De-Hi, but I sure wasn't expecting it to read like something Shaun Hutson would write. Passion Killers shares the same fixation for the seedy side of 1980s Soho that you get from Hutson books like Chainsaw Terror and Captives. It concerns a bunch of strippers who fight back against their boss, stripclub owner Ahmed Abdullah, after discovering he's been filming himself having sex with them. Robbery turns to murder, when the strippers tie up Ahmed while trying to steal the sex tapes, only for him to choke to death on the G-string they gagged him with. 19 years later and the former strippers are not only being blackmailed by the current owner of the sex tapes, but are also being stalked by a killer who appears to be avenging Ahmed's death by leaving his victims with a G-string in their mouths. On the case is DCI Paul Banham, a man haunted by the brutal murder of his wife and daughter, to the extent that it has left him incapable of having sex 'the prospect of his colleagues knowing about his inadequacy in that department didn’t bear thinking about' and with an aversion to the sight of murdered females. A hang up that results in a memorable scene when Banham vomits all over a Soho sex shop, throwing up 'over the window displaying the crotchless knickers and fruit-flavoured condoms'. Fortunately Regan's writing throws him a romantic lifeline in the form of Katie Faye, one of the blackmailed former strippers who has since reinvented herself as a popular actress in a medical themed TV show, and views the sex tape as a stink bomb that could damage a mainstream career. Katie is a character who possibly warrants some autobiographical interpretation, Regan herself having appeared in the medical themed TV show General Hospital but prior to that had done her time in saucy, X-cert movies by the likes of Derek Ford and Norman Cohen. According to her Wikipedia page she was also the victim of an attempted abduction at knifepoint in 2005, an incident that is disturbingly replicated in Passion Killers. Further insights into Regan within these pages include a possible dislike of Cannon and Ball, the subject of a dig here, and we can safely assume she's more of a dog person than a cat one. The killer gets to chop a cat's head off at one point 'slicing the terrified animal’s head from its body and batting it though the air like a cricket ball'. While in her author's intro, Regan mentions that she and her actor husband Brian Murphy own a dog called Mildred, presumably named in honour of Murphy's sitcom George and Mildred, which is adorable. Well much more adorable than a cat's severed head being used like a cricket ball anyway.
Passion Killers certainly sees Regan cast off her goody two shoes Hi-De-Hi image, and go strong on the gore "Blood from the wounds in her head had slid down her forehead, congealing around a colony of maggots over the holes that once were eyes" and some of her more inspired dialogue includes "I thought it was quite funny, till he stuck a rubber penis up my back passage and called me Dusty Springfield". The book has the feel of a police drama series but spiced up with jolting, brutal murders commited by a black gloved killer, like an episode of The Bill with directorial interference from Dario Argento. There's maybe too much focus on the love lives of various police characters and too little giallo action towards the end of the book. Still I have to admit to enjoying Regan's unlikely career reinvention, and the discovery that she's written a bunch of these things, means that I'm sure to return to the unexpected rabbit hole that is Linda Regan, gorehound crime novelist.
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