Book Review: Chain of Darkness by Kenneth Cook

This book is an interesting idea. There are two strands to the story. The first strand is about the murderer and his attempts to evade the police, the second strand is about a reporter for a TV broadcaster covering the police hunt for the murderer.

The book was first published in 1962 and is set in Australia. The murderer is a brutal character and kills people with something approaching enthusiasm, so readers may wish to bear this in mind.

The police follow the murderer into the bush with dogs on his track. The reporter decides to drive around on the roads around the area with his team, as he figured the murderer will have to come out of the bush eventually in order to steal a vehicle. Sure enough the murderer and the reporter do meet and the reporter persuades him to give an interview, before he takes their food and disappears back into the bush.

This scoop is willingly broadcast by the reporter’s TV station, but he’s called back to the studios by the head of station. The reporter is in trouble because the sponsor of the programme (a pharmaceutical company) is not happy about murderers appearing on TV during their sponsorship time. The quote from the sponsor is as follows:

My company does not pay large amounts of money just to enable criminals, murderers, to make excuses for themselves in our programme. Bluntly, our programme is to sell medicine, and that sort of thing doesn’t do it.

This is an attempt by a sponsoring company to control the media. It is fiction, it is written in 1962, but is prescient.