A Prayer for the Dying by Jack Higgins

 

(pb; 1973)

From the back cover

“Fallon was the best you could get with a gun in his hand. His track record went back a long and shady way.

“This time the bidding came from Dandy Jack Meehan, an underworld baron with a thin varnish of respectability. Not exactly the type you’d want to meet in a dark alley.

“The job Dandy Jack wanted doing was up North, but when Fallon got there he soon found himself changing sides—which put him in opposition to Meehan, a place where life expectancy suddenly gets very short indeed.”

 

Review

Prayer is an excellent, grip-you-from-the-get-go thriller with great, unique and memorable characters, character- and morality-based gravitas and action, as well a potent blend of omnipresent themes, e.g., regret, religion, imperialism, overall morality, etc., that—along with Higgins’s superbly sketched characters, clever-twists, and cut-to-it writing, lift this above the usual thriller. It might not go anywhere you don’t expect at times, but it’s so well-written and character-true that a certain inevitability is a virtue here. Worth owning, this.

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The resulting film was released in released in the UK on May 13, 1987. Its stateside release happened on September 11, 1987. Prayer director Mike Hodges, along with one of its co-stars, Mickey Rourke, forswore the studio’s theatrical cut of the film. Screenwriters: Edmund Ward and Martin Lynch. (Studio: The Samuel Goldwyn Company, which trimmed Prayer so it would play less like a drama with occasional violence, and more like an action movie for American audiences. Mike Hodges’s director's cut is said to exist, but it has not been released.)