GOOD SCAMMER by Guy Kennaway

GOOD SCAMMER

Guy Kennaway

Mensch Publishing (menschpublishing.com)

£20

Clive “Bangaz” Thompson is a West Jamaican native, orphaned at birth, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time: working in a call centre, Bangaz got his hands on a customer list and a handful of scripts – which he built upon and updated over the years – that were to be a veritable pot of gold. Bangaz, and the friends with whom he shared his new business model, brought in millions of dollars over the years to their small community, without recourse to violence and without having to work too hard. Bangaz was a telephone scammer who knew exactly how far to push his victims. As Bangaz tells his story to a local writer, he quickly discovers that not everyone sees the world through the same rose-tinted glasses as him. The gangster from whom he stole his original list is out of prison and looking for revenge; meanwhile the FBI have gotten involved, since most of Bangaz’s victims were American, and the heat is gradually increasing. And now Willy Loxley-Gordon, the writer to whom Bangaz is telling his story, is worried that he’ll be considered an accomplice, and he hasn’t even agreed a fee yet!

Based on a true(ish) story, Guy Kennaway takes a metafiction approach to his latest novel, Good Scammer. Born when a local Jamaican gangster decided that Guy was going to write his story, Guy introduces us to Willy Loxley-Gordon, a British ex-pat who now lives in the small coastal community of Campbell Cove, which was, for a period in the early 2000s, the phone scamming capital of the world, thanks to Clive “Bangaz” Thompson, who has decided that Willy will be the man to bring his story to the world. Told, much to Bangaz’s chagrin, in the Jamaican patois (or Patwa), Good Scammer evokes a real sense of Jamaica, and of the often colourful characters who inhabit this small fishing community, and who take to phone scamming like the proverbial fish to water.

The most colourful of these is, of course, Bangaz himself, raised by an aunt who had no other choice but to take care of him when his mother died in childbirth, Bangaz found it hard to keep a job and was always on the lookout for ways to make easy money. When a friend offered him a job in a call centre, he saw it as a way to improve his English, until he discovered how easy it was to bilk people out of their hard-earned money with a couple of simple, believable lies – you’ve won the lottery, and we will send you your winnings when you’ve paid this tax, or that levy – and access to Western Union. He finds his bosses’ list of potential victims at the best possible moment: as he steals the list, both bosses are arrested, extradited to the USA and given long sentences for fraud. Sharing the list and his scripts with a few of his closest friends, Bangaz sets out to do the same thing on a much larger scale, but without the overheads and traceability of a legitimate business like a call centre.

Bangaz is surround by a cast of vivid and lifelike characters, from his partners-in-crime, to the area’s Minister for Justice who is happy to look the other way if it means a steady stream of income; young Deleisha who sees the politician as her ticket out of West Jamaica, disappearing after an eventful – and fraught, for the minister, who finds himself abroad with both his wife and mistress – trip to a climate conference in Paris; Willy, the old writer who finds himself increasingly worried for his own safety and wondering if he’ll ever see a penny for all the work he is putting into telling his friend’s story; and the various policemen and FBI agents who try to capture Bangaz along the way, one of whom, it turns out, is related to one of the elderly women that Bangaz scammed at the start of his career.

Kennaway puts a human face on the scammers that we have all encountered at one time or another. While Bangaz isn’t always entirely likeable, he is a sympathetic person and we find ourselves rooting for him, even while we despise how he earns a living. We find ourselves wondering how the people he reels in can be so stupid, and how they can keep throwing money at him, but also appreciating the genius mind that thought this scam up and made it work.

Guy Kennaway’s latest novel is an engaging and fun way to spend some time. These are characters that we will never really love, but with whom we enjoy spending some time. We constantly ask ourselves if we’re rooting for the police or for the scammers and, I’ll be honest, I still don’t know the answer, which I think might just be the point. Good Scammer is unlike anything else you’ll read this year, but it’s definitely worth your time.