Knife's Edge

Zine
Title:	Knife's Edge
Publisher:	Nut Hatch & Entropy Press
Editor:
Author(s):	Sara Lansing and Barbara Jones
Cover Artist(s):
Illustrator(s):
Date(s):	July 1993
Series?:	yes
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	Professionals
Language:	English
External Links:	Entropy Press press
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Knife's Edge is a gen 160-page Professionals novel in a series by Sara Lansing and Barbara Jones.

another version of the cover

From the cover: "In the summer of 1985, while London bakes, CI5 locks horns with the most ruthless and powerful army the underworld has ever known. This time Bodie and Doyle are up against a savage voodoo army, a tribe straight from hell."

You can read a sample from it here.

The Series

Series order taken from a 1999 Entropy Press flyer. Note that the zine order (and content) differs from what is noted at Palely Loitering.

• Goblin (1992)
• Knife's Edge (1993)
• Operation Assegai (1995)
• Hellburner (1997)
• Deep Fire (1998)
• Hostage London (1999)

Flyer Description

From the flyer:

flyer

Well-known Nut Hatch writer Barb Jones joins the author of the techno-thriller Goblin in a new B&D generic thriller set in the early 1980s universe of the TV episodes... lashings of your favourite relationship material, plus a thoroughly unforgettable, bizarre London voodoo thriller!! A thin line separates good from evil. Sometimes men are pushed beyond their limitations, and when there's nothing left to lose, the courage of conviction can be your greatest weapon.

There's a new boss in town. The Organisation is tired, it has been in the hands of the same few crime lords for too many years and is ripe for take-over. The time has come for a new wave and the British underworld is rolled hard by a new broom that sweeps exceedingly dirty.

One by one, the old strongholds of organised crime go under and the police are baffled. The new man is clever, a world master of his craft, and the only lead the law is going to get comes from the lips of a dying man — the deathbed confession of an old boss who has learned the hard way, that there is no honour among thieves. He confesses to George Cowley, places in his hands the means to find the new man, who will take Britain in his grasp and squeeze until the last drop of blood has fallen. CI5 is assigned the case. Unlimited access, unlimited sanction. Find the man, take him down, take his organisation apart, cut out the new web of crime and tyranny that is reaching its tentacle-like members throughout the country. This is organised crime on a scale Britain has never seen, an army of thugs who would turn London into Los Angeles, given half a chance. George Cowley swears they will never get that chance.

But the Organisation, like any entity, knows when it is under threat, and its only concept of defence is attack. In a terrifyingly short time, the situation escalates into full war. CI5 versus the lords of crime, a backalley slugging match with high-tech weapons that spills onto the front page of every paper. No holds barred, no quarter given. Cowley lies dying with an assassin's bullet in him, and Bodie and Doyle, Murphy, Brian Macklin and the best that CI5 can field find themselves running for their lives in a hellfire skirmish that never ends. It's “us or them,” the immovable object has met the irresistible force. The result may be mutual annihilation!

Description from the Editorial

Stand by for the blast of your lives!

the zine's editorial

You may have never read a Professionals novel quite like this one, at least not within the main stream of the series format. The show steered well dear of "odd" things, like the occult, while in the episodes Klansmen and Heroes it gave a look in some detail at black culture in Britain today. We saw the Rastafarians, the drug and prostitution rackets in which black bosses played a part. We saw plenty of depiction of the drug trade, and the show, to some extent, lived on its full-power, full-realism depiction of the skills of urban combat soldiers.

In Knife's Edge, Australian novelist Sara Lansing is joined by Nut Hatch favourite Barbara Jones in a cooperative venture into the arcane world of power and magic which revolves around the nexus of Voodoo.

Voodoo is alive and well, the descendant of West African tribal magic, known originally as Juju, I believe. The intricacies of voodoo belief, the practice of tribal magic and the nature of voodoo culture are deep and complex, and outside the scope of this novel, but the writers have created a shadowy, almost eerie vision of a power that white westerners can barely understand.

Bodie and Doyle, the entire of CI-5, the enforcement powers of Britain, are stretched to the limit this time. Sara's previous novel, Goblin, was a military techno-thriller that explored artificial intelligence and the mentality of the soldier, as well as a rollicking battle across the snows of Scotland in pursuit of a rogue robot. Knife's Edge is a very different situation, a thriller on the streets of London at the height of an unusually hot summer, when a strange, crazed army of the night comes snarling and blasting out of its underworld warren to take over the illegal trade in drugs.

The novel follows loosely from Goblin in as much as the characters have incorporated the experiences of their brush with the future, and Ray's girlfriend, Jessy Irving, makes a second appearance. But the novels are very different in just about every other way.

Almost all of the series characters appear: aside from Bodie, Doyle and Cowley we have Murphy, Anson, Jax, Lucas, McCabe, Fischer, Macklin, Tauser, Craine, Ross... Even the black surgeon seen in a couple of episodes, George's friend the Minister, and Bodie's Kendo master seen in Wild Justice. This is old-home week for CI-5, when all the stops are pulled out.

And they have to be. Remember the Stoner AR-180 evaluated by our heroes in Hunter Hunted? CI-5 can be glad they were impressed and bought a consignment of those high-power assault rifles, because they need them like they need air to breathe. This is not just an enemy, not some hood with a gun, not even organised crime like the Mafia and the Organisation ... This is something driven by an alien ideology, within an entirely alien frame of reference, and an almost spiritual reverence for the raw, bloody maximum force provided by the machine gun. Chairman Mao is reputed to have said that "power flows from the barrel of the gun," and whether or not he actually did is irrelevant: the new drug army that rises in the night to take control is an absolute believer in this philosophy.

I'm not going to second guess the story for you, I'm not even going to tell you anything else about it, except to say that it hits the six-inch nail on the head with a sledge-hammer if you like fast action, laced with good humour and wonderful banter between our heroes. Bodie and Doyle play off each other as they do in the series, the quick-fire back-chat, ribald stories and empathic understanding that friends share. The writers have captured the essence of a partnership, men who work closely in an environment of spontaneous danger, and their often hilarious sense of humour is a shield for their sanity against a sea of woes that would take down lesser men.

Right, here they are, Lancing and Jones, full-throttle. Fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, and carefully turn this page.

Oh, and by the way, Sara and Barb aren't finished, not by a very long mile. They left a very Arnie-like message: They'll be back.

Hasta la Vista!

Fan Comments

The tank story is a gen novel called Goblin by Sara Lansing, a fairly pacey, very hardware based sci-thriller and it's sequel is Knife's Edge by Sara Lansing and Barbara Jones which is a pretty gorey occult thriller. They are both published by the Nuthatch, though not terribly typical of that press. (Aussie dollar currently 58c US, so if you're thinking Nuthatch, do it now.) The tank one is probably worth a read for novelty value if you don't mind gen, it's well written, but if you don't like action novels it will probably bore you silly. I did find out more about military helicopters than I ever felt a need to know!