#britgrit: 3 Cracking Brit Grit Novels From Cathi Unsworth.
Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth
At the start of the Swinging Sixties, a serial killer nicknamed Jack The Stripper stalked te streets of West London. In Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth smartly weaves together fact and fiction as she tells the stories of Stella – a young fashion- designer who is haunted by visons of the dead women – and PC Peter Bradley, a policeman who is investigation the killings.
First published in 2010 by Serpents Tail, Bad Penny Blues as now been republished by Strange Attractor Press and now includes an introduction from no less than Greil Marcus as well as The Ghosts Of Ladbroke Grove, a revealing afterword from Cathi Unsworth.
Bad Penny Blues remains a cracking yarn with a great sense of time and place and is, of course, highly recommended.
Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth
Cathi Unsworth‘s marvellously atmospheric Weirdo (2012) takes place in an English seaside town, the fictitious Ernemouth. Again two sides of the town are contrasted with bright lights hiding dark and dirty corners. A private detective investigates a 20 year old murder and unearths some nasty secrets. Weirdo cleverly takes place in two time periods (2003 and 1983), is populated with great charters and has a vividly, strong sense of time and place.
The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth
Published in 2005, Cathi Unsworth’s The Not Knowing was her first novel. It is set in London in the early ’90s and what a great slice of London life it is. Diane Kemp is a journalist working for the trendy Lux magazine. When an uber-hip British film director goes missing she is dragged into the investigation. Meanwhile, a killer stalks the city. The Not Knowing is a cracking murder mystery with a great sense of time and place and is a hell of a read.
#britgrit: 5 Classic Brit Grit Novels
LAYER CAKE BY J J CONNOLLY
“You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you’re up in the rarefied atmosphere and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son.” – Eddie Temple, Layer Cake.
The 1980s was the loadsamoney decade. The era of greed is good and going for it. By the time the 90s dawdled along, London’s young guns had already grasped the bull by its horns and crashed into any number of china shops, flashing their cash, getting their way by hook and, with regard to Layer Cake’s protagonist, very much by crook.
“Everyone wants to walk through a door marked ‘private.’ Therefore, have a good reason to be affluent.“
JJ Connolly’s Layer Cake was first published in 2000 by Duckworth Press but it is set in London in the 1990s. And it is very much a 90s London novel. As of its time as Moloko, Portishead, Brit Pop, Cool Britannia, celebrity chefs, This Life or YBAs.
Layer Cake’s unnamed narrator is a successful young drug dealer who has plans to ditch his life of crime once he reaches the ripe old age of 30 and live the life of a gentleman of leisure. Of course, things don’t go to plan. Once a shipment of ecstasy is hijacked, everything turns pear-shaped for our anti-hero as quickly as spit disappears on hot pavement. Violence, double-cross and triple-cross invariably ensue.
The plot is tight and twisty, but one of its main strengths is its rich and varied cast of lowlife characters, such as the short-fused Mr Mortimer; The Duke – the cokehead leader of a criminal gang known as the Yahoos; The Duke’s psychotic and equally as coke addled girlfriend Slasher; a smooth and smart conman known as either Billy Bogus or Cody Garrett; Klaus, the leader of a group of German neo-Nazis; ‘Crazy’ Larry Flynn – a gangster with a penchant for strangling rent boys; and a Doberman called Mike Tyson.
JJ Connolly’s debut novel could well have been received a cult classic for crime fiction connoisseurs, for fans of Derek Raymond’s Factory novels or Ted Lewis perhaps. Or it could have been seen as a well-regarded but obscure London noir like Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City, or James Curtis’ The Gilt Kid. But it burst into the mainstream with rave reviews from all sorts of respectable square joints such as The Times, The Guardian and The Literary Review.
The novel has a lot in common with the all-mouth and well-cut trousers stylings of the mockney gangster capers popularised by film director Guy Ritchie in the 90s. So it’s no great surprise that the 2004 film version of Layer Cake was the directorial debut of Guy Ritchie’s erstwhile producer Matthew Vaughn. Starring future Mr Bond, Daniel Craig, the film did pretty damned well on its own terms, too, focusing on some of the supporting cast of characters and giving us a fistful of great performances – particularly from Colm Meaney, George Harris and Michael Gambon.
Enjoyable as the film version of Layer Cake was, it didn’t quite capture the voice of the novel – a John Lydon/Peter Cook sneer mixed with a fatalistic sigh of resignation. Layer Cake is brash, vivid and blackly-comic but it is at least as much about the argot as it as about the aggro, peppered as much with laddish badinage – ladinage – as it is with bullets and birds. The language is also quite arch, telling the tale in an off-kiler, askew way. Now, 20 years on from its publication, the book still seems breathlessly fresh.
We waited a full ten years until Connolly followed up Layer Cake with the splendid Viva La Madness, which saw Layer Cake’s protagonist attempting to lay low in Jamaica until Mr Mortimer arrived to drag him back into a life of crime.
In October 2011, I interviewed JJ Connolly for my blog, and I asked about the long wait for the sequel to his debut novel.
PDB: We’ve been waiting for Viva La Madness for ten years, why so long?
JJC: I was working on films, traveling, messing around, getting in and out of trouble, having fun. Two years ago I decided I better stop messing around and sat down and finished Viva. I’d been working on it – on and off, more off than on, for almost ten years, since I finished Layer Cake, in fact. I got distracted, but distracted in a nicest possible way, in some nice places, with some nice people.
Then Connolly seemed to go underground again for another decade…
Well, it’s now the 20th anniversary of Layer Cake’s publication and this special edition has a very tasty new cover along with a revealing and intriguing afterword from Mister Connolly himself. A republished version of Viva la Madness is on its way too, as is a Viva la Madness television series from Sky TV, starring no less than Jason Statham.
So what next for JJ Connolly? Maybe the hat-trick? When I interviewed him in 2011 he said:
“I want to write another book with the narrator from Layer Cake and Viva la Madness, to complete a trilogy. I like the voice.“
So, in the words of Moloko, the time is now …
(THIS FIRST APPEARED OVER AT CRIME FICTION LOVER)
BRIGHTON ROCK BY GRAHAM GREENE
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him”
From its brilliant opening line, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) grabs you by the throat and almost strangles you with its intensity. The lives of fantastically rich characters, such as big hearted Ida Arnold who is investigating Hale’s murder and Pinkie, the psychotic young gangster, intertwine in a gripping novel that is well-deserved of its classic status. The seaside town of Brighton itself is also one of the book’s strongest characters, as the glitz and grit collide.
OF LOVE AND HUNGER BY JULIAN MACLAREN ROSS
I must confess, I’d never heard of this book or its author until relatively recently when I was discussing ‘seaside noir’ - and it was recommended to me.
Julian Maclaren-Ross seems to have been a bit of a rogue, to be sure, and he certainly seems to have lived a varied and colourful life. Of Love and Hunger is a novel inspired by his time as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in the 1930s. It is rich with great characters and has a great sense of time and place.
Although it was written in 1943, Of Love and Hunger is really like a breath of fresh air. Maclaren-Ross has a strong authorial voice and the exploits of the novel’s protagonist are both tragic and humorous. Of Love and Hunger is an immensely satisfying read and the foreword by Paul Willits is also well-worth checking out.
At the start of the Swinging Sixties, a serial killer nicknamed Jack The Stripper stalked te streets of West London. In Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth smartly weaves together fact and fiction as she tells the stories of Stella – a young fashion- designer who is haunted by visons of the dead women – and PC Peter Bradley, a policeman who is investigation the killings.
PLENDER BY TED LEWIS
Ted Lewis’ PLENDER is an off-kilter novel about an off-kilter man. And its all the better for it, too. Plender himself is a full-on sleazeball: a private detective, a blackmailer and more. Plender’s chance encounter with Knott, a childhood cohort, gives him the opportunity to corkscrew himself into Knott’s life, whether Knott likes it or not. PLENDER is as gripping as it is misanthropic, as humorous as it is violent. Ted Lewis proves himself yet again as one of the masters of dark, gritty, British fiction. He doesn’t so much as glare at the lowlife, as embrace it. There’s a tasty introduction from Nick Triplow in the version that I nabbed, too.
GBH BY TED LEWIS
GBH was Lewis’ final novel – published in 1980- and it’s pretty damned fantastic. The book’s title is an abbreviation of ‘grievous bodily harm’, a term used in English criminal law to describe a particularly violent form of physical assault. GBH is the story of the decline of London gangster and pornographer George Fowler, and it is cleverly told in two alternating time periods. The earlier period is set in London and is titled The Smoke. The later period is set in an off-season seaside down and is titled The Sea.
GBH has the lot – great characters, sharp dialogue, richly descriptive prose, a cold clammy atmosphere, a powerful sense of time and place, and a cruel, dark humour. It really is a cracking read and is well-deserved of its classic status.
You could also do yourself a favour and pick up Nick Triplow’s Getting Carter : Ted Lewis and the birth of Brit Noir
What a treasure trove of information and good recommendations towards several authors I've never read. Thanks Paul.
I’m excited to check out some of these authors, thank you for sharing! 🤗💖