Boris Starling (born c.1969)Sohn, Amy (1999) "GETTING A HANDLE ON HOT 'MESSIAH' SCRIBE", New York Post, 7 September 1999, p. 22, ("at 30 he's already been on endless European best-seller lists") is a British novelist and screenwriter. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first in History.
Starling is the great-grandson of the English physiologist Ernest Starling. His sister Belinda was also an author; her novel The Journal of Dora Damage was published posthumously in the UK and US in late 2007. She died in August 2006 of complications following bile duct surgery. She was 34.
Boris Starling lives in Dorset with his wife, a television producer, and their children. He is currently working on a variety of book, film and television projects. A keen sportsman, he plays football for the Prairie Dogs team of West London, and is a member of the Jose Raul Capablanca Memorial Chess Society, founded by fellow author Charles Cumming. He and Cumming were part of the gold medal-winning team at the 2008 World Poohsticks championships, held in Oxfordshire, England. Starling was also Eton College's Visiting Writer in Michaelmas 2007.
He worked first as a journalist for newspapers such as The Sun and the Sunday Telegraph, and then for Control Risks, a firm which assesses the risks to companies of terrorism and political upheaval, and provides services ranging from confidential investigations to kidnap resolution.
In 1996, he appeared on the BBC quiz show Mastermind, where he reached the semi-finals. His specialist topics were 'Hergé and the Books of Tintin', and 'The Life and Novels of Dick Francis', who came to watch the filming.
His first book, Messiah, was published in 1999. Set in London, Messiah features a serial killer known as Silver Tongue, who is killing men in a variety of bizarre ways, with the only constant being the removal of their tongues and insertion of a silver spoon into their mouths.
Notable for its fast pace and high levels of gore, Messiah was a commercial and critical success, reaching both the New York Times and the official UK bestseller lists. It was subsequently adapted for television by the BBC, with Starling taking a cameo role as a murder victim's corpse. There have been four television sequels broadcast. Messiah I-IV starred Ken Stott in the lead role as DCI Redfern Metcalfe. For Messiah V, Marc Warren took over as DCI Joseph Walker, heading up an entirely new cast. Messiah V was broadcast on BBC1 in January 2008. Starling is listed as series creator of the franchise.
His second book, also a New York Times bestseller, and winner of the W. H. Smith 'Thumping Good Read' Award, was Storm. Set in Aberdeen, Storm begins with a ferry disaster, and follows the subsequent week in the life of Kate Beauchamp, one of the detectives from Messiah, as she tries to find a serial killer while her estranged father heads up the investigation into the ferry sinking.
Starling changed tack substantially with his third novel. Vodka is a sprawling, epic story of Russia immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, and runs several storylines in tandem: the efforts of an American banker, Alice Liddell, to effect the first privatisation in Russian history; the battle between Slav and Chechen gangs for control of Moscow's vodka market; and the hunt for a serial killer who is killing children and draining their blood.
Reaction to Vodka was mixed; some critics felt that Starling had over-reached himself in trying to portray a society on the edge of anarchy in all its ingloriousness, while others praised this same ambition, plus the characterisation and the depth of the research which helped paint such a convincing picture of Moscow in the early 1990s.
Another shift in period and location came with the publication of Starling's fourth novel, Visibility. Visibility is set in the winter of 1952, when the Great Fog has rolled into London, shutting down most transportation routes and sickening the populace with its noxious haze. Herbert Smith, drummed out of MI5 as the patsy for a bungled Soviet spy caper, is now a detective inspector in the murder division at New Scotland Yard, where he is treated with harsh wariness by his fellow policemen. Assigned to investigate a suspicious drowning, Smith discovers that the victim, a young biochemist and son of a highly placed government official, had in the hours before his death claimed to be in possession of a discovery that could change the world.
Many critics feel that Visibility is the best of Starling's books so far. The Guardian's Maxim Jakubowski called it "mystery at its best," while in the New Statesman Adam LeBor said: "Visibility is an intelligent and thought-provoking book, one that asks lingering questions about the very nature of loyalty and love."
