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.