Review: Bad Penny Blues.

(It’s no secret that Ray Banks –fine purveyor of British Noir—is a friend of mine, so when he offered to review Cathi Unsworth’s just published Bad Penny Blues for me, I jumped at the chance. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?)

Bad Penny Blues
Cathi Unsworth
Serpent’s Tail £7.99

Honest-to-God genuine noir fiction is difficult to find these days, especially in the UK. Too often what passes for noir is diluted with the mundanity of the police procedural or else splattered with grue, the emotional core of the story lost to cliché and pandering to an audience deadened by ITV drama. It’s a rare author who manages to get right to the marrow of what Derek Raymond called “the black novel”, and, thankfully, Cathi Unsworth is one of those authors. She’s been quietly channelling Raymond since her 2005 debut The Not Knowing, and giving his metaphysical sadness with a refreshing contemporary spin. And now she’s back with a novel that represents not only a consolidation of theme, but also an expansion of her already considerable talent.

Bad Penny Blues takes as its main thread the Jack The Stripper murders that took place in Ladbroke Grove between 1959 and 1965. Its narrative is split neatly between two disparate protagonists, pop artist turned successful clothes designer Stella and policeman Pete. Though these two never actually cross paths during the course of the novel, they’re only ever a breath away from each other. Stella is plagued with empathic fits, sudden glimpses into the minds of the prospective victims, their italicised narrative voices a twilight fever dream rudely interrupted by Jack himself. The opening chapter is one of these connections, which leads us to PC Pete’s discovery of the first body. What follows is a brisk and kaleidoscopic jaunt through early Sixties’ London, including Teds, hippies, corrupt cops, a deviant upper class, the rabble-rousing antics of Oswald Mosley and the aftermath of the Profumo affair.

When I say brisk, I mean it. There aren’t many writers who can produce something over 400 pages that reads twice as fast, and this is where I assume the Ellroy influence came to bear on proceedings. Not only that, but Ellroy’s hard and fast way with modern history is something Unsworth shares. Bad Penny Blues is to the history books what Guy Debord is to the A-to-Z. This is not really the Sixties, this is a deconstructed and reassembled psycho-history, a dramatic alternative. Just as The Not Knowing held up a warped mirror to the Guy Ritchie phenomenon and The Singer to the birth and death of punk, so Bad Penny Blues takes the historical crime novel and turns it into a séance.

This atmosphere is no obvious stylistic trick, either. Those already familiar with Unsworth’s work will recognise that moment in the story where her protagonist is thrown into a shimmering unreality by circumstances beyond their control – when a film director becomes the dead centrepiece in a scene from his breakthrough hit; when a long-lost singer is plucked from the miasma of the past with shocking consequences – but Bad Penny Blues is the only one to fully embrace the unreality of it all. The novel takes a swift left turn about ninety pages in when the concept of Spiritualism is introduced as a key plotline, and is done so in complete seriousness. It’s testament to Unsworth’s talent that the whole concept sits so easily within the world she’s created; in lesser hands, the idea of communicating with the other side in the middle of a crime novel would be laughable. But she’s already introduced us to a version of Joe Meek, whose occult experiments in sound led him down a dark and ultimately suicidal path, as well as dazzled us with Stella’s nightmares. Even the woman on the cover bears a striking resemblance to scream queen Barbara Steele which, if it wasn’t on purpose, is certainly fortuitous.

And so Bad Penny Blues moves into voodoo crime territory, a kind of effortless and emotionally varied take on David Peace. It’s here that it ultimately resides, queen of all it surveys, and a shining beacon to those of us bored with the machinations of pseudo-maverick coppers and dowager sleuths. My only gripe would be its release date, which comes dangerously close to missing those year-end Best Of lists, and risks being drowned in an ocean of Christmas ghost-written fluff. That would be an enormous shame, because Bad Penny Blues isn’t only one of the best crime novels this year, it’s one of the best of the decade.

Ray Banks.

Down In The Factory, Over on The Rap Sheet..

Okay, long radio silence here (which will be altering in the New Year) so I thought I’d give you all a heads up on where I’ve been.

Firstly, I’m curating a Derek “the father of brit-noir” Raymond season over at The Rap Sheet, which was announced here.

Tony Black’s strong review is already live and will be joined this Friday by John Harvey, then Russel D McLean, Cathi Unsworth and the formidable Ray Banks, who lands the series for us.

Thanks once again to all the contributors, you guys are rock stars (at least in my house.)

Secondly, the most satisfying and popular thing I wrote last year was my Hammett appreciation.

When I left Hub Magazine I searched high and low for a magazine looking to take a bi-monthly (those things are very satisfying and a nightmare to produce) column of interrogations/investigations of a piece, to no avail.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I was approached by the CRIME FACTORY boys to do just that. I am VERY happy to announce that CRIME SCENE returns, with the January debuting inaugural issue of Crime Factory.

I know it’s customary to profess excitement about these kind of things, but Keith and Cam have assembelled a really impressive roster of writers for this project and I’m honestly thrilled to be in the mix. (In fact, Cam tells me that the 'Factory' portion of the magazine's name is a nod to the Derek Raymond novels. See how this post ties together?)

Under The Influence: Dot Allison and Afterglow.

If you came of age during ‘Britpop’ and you incline towards the indie end of the market, the chances are that Dot Allison acts as a thread running between some of the more disparate elements of your CD Collection. After all, that’s her siren’s lament you can hear on Death In Vegas’ doom-laden lullaby ‘Dirge’ and that’s her duetting with Peter Doherty on his recent ‘Grace/Wastelands’ album.

Collaborations are great (and very much part of the mid-to-late nineties soundscape.) but can obfuscate a solo artist’s worth. Which is a real shame as, a decade on; Dot Allison’s solo debut really ought to be considered a classic of modern British electronica.

Partly due to the blessed-out euphoria of One Dove (her pervious band) and partly due to her gender, Allison was initially dubbed a ‘comedown queen’ which suggests something anodyne, like a proto-Duffy. Instead, it’s an album of two halves: Mani’s bass rumbling through album opener ‘coulor me’ and the propulsive ‘close your eyes’ conspire to give the record a hard, almost monochromatic feel.

The encroaching darkness, however, is counter-pointed by lighter touches, such as the album’s moment of pop brilliance ‘Did I Imagine You?’ (Featuring lyrics by Hal David.) Or the album’s evocative closer ‘In Winter Still’, highlighting Allison’s flair for lyrics: “there’s lipstick on the glass” she sings “the question left unasked.”

It’s a producer’s record too, best experienced in an immersive environment (on headphones or walking around post-industrial Manchester, in my experience.) Allowing the listener to be enveloped in its layered soundscape. However, to to simply call it a ‘producers record’ verges on the dismissive, particularly when both the arrangements and –as already noted—the lyrics are so carefully calibrated.

Slightly over a decade since its initial release, I was surprised to find how well the album held up. (The only track I’m slightly unenthused about remains ‘Mo’Pop’ and then only because it’s not quite as good as the others.) Which either suggests that electronica simply hasn’t advanced in the last ten years or that the album is just that classy. Either way: it’s aged a lot better than the majority of those ‘lads bands’ that were big around the turn of the century have…

Those Changes.

Alright, I guess the second hiatus of the year is officially underway.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been house hunting and my laptop has imploded. It should be okay, once it receives the TLC of a professional in these matters.

The enforced downtime has given me an opportunity to think about what, if anything, I’m attempting to achieve with this place and the addition of a .com to the name is the start of several changes you’ll be seeing in the coming months.

We kick off with a multiple part interview with Alan Guthrie, then take a lot at the first year or Vertigo’s ‘Sandman Mystery Theatre’ and chat with it’s writer, the independent comics legend Matt Wagner. Going forward we’ll have contributions from both Ray Banks and Anthony Neil Smith. (Both long-term friends of the site.)

I’m also going to be instituting something called ‘Short Fiction Review’ which is, simply, a review of a short story that you captivated by of late. If you wish to contribute to that, please contact me at: gordonharries@needlescratchstatic.com

So come back and look around come the 1st of September.

It’s gonna be fun.

Needlescratchstatic.com?

Things are changing….

Off-line for a few days as I move house and stuff, will be checking email intermittentldy.

See you on the other side.

Rush Of The Day

"To put the Wade/Nichols case in some kind of perspective; it may have been the toughest one I’ve ever handled in my professional life of more than thirty years, and it wasn’t even criminal. I do criminal. My name is Jerry Kennedy and I don’t take civil cases. This is widely known -- I have made it so. I refer civil matters to civil lawyers, who very kindly don’t do criminal and therefore thoughtfully refer such nasty stuff to me. I am not myself uncivil, or try not to be, at least; I just prefer to play it smart, which means: do what I’m used to doing, and therefore know how to do, well --well enough at a minimum to convince civilians watching that I do know what I’m doing. So far that’s been good enough. That may be criminal, but it’s not forbidden by law. So: why did I take the mixed-breed Wade/Nichols case, the hardest case I never tried? Which looked like it was civil but was really criminal? And, when you come right down to it, de facto made me into what I’ve never been before in my whole life, a fucking prosecutor?"

That ladies and gentlemen, it’s the breathless and brilliant opening to ‘Sandra Nichols Found Dead’ by George V. Higgins. Here, in 2009, it comes across as Michael Clayton-eque, dunnit it?