London Noir - Capital Crime Fiction - Edited by Cathi Unsworth

LONDON NOIR – CAPITAL CRIME FICTION 

- EDITED BY CATHI UNSWORTH

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. Collections of short stories edited by some writer or other where invariably eight out of ten stories are rubbish or mediocre at best and two are good though not brilliant. I should have learned my lesson by now and know not to waste my time with such books but like a moth drawn to a flame I'm back here again but only because of whom London Noir has been edited by. That being ex-Melody Maker and Sounds music scribe, novelist and officially one of the most beautiful women in the world, Cathi Unsworth. Last seen on a book signing tour with prime mover punkerella icon, Jordan.

So what have we got? Well, first off there's Cathi Unsworth's introduction which is a really good piece of writing in itself, laying down the gauntlet for the standard of writing that needs to be matched. There are seventeen stories in total by seventeen different authors which unwittingly tests how well-read you are by seeing how many of them you know. I know eight of them but that includes Stewart Home who everyone knows, along with Cathi Unsworth herself.

Stewart Home's piece is surprisingly good but that's only because he drops the Richard Allen shtick and delivers instead a straightforward story about corrupt police and dead junkies. Barry Adamson's piece is an exercise in rubbing your face in the dirt but has a very good twist as in who the narrator is. As to be hoped for from being edited by an ex-music journalist there are plenty of music references throughout, most notably in Max Decharne's piece set around the 1977 London punk scene where bodies start turning up with notes pinned to them quoting lyrics from X-Ray Spex songs. Max Decharne for those unaware is the lead vocalist of the Flaming Stars.

So too in Cathi Unsworth's offering where Lola by The Kinks is the key, and in John Williams' offering, New Rose, which is obviously a nod to The Damned. And then there is Sic Transit Gloria Mundi written by Joolz Denby (partner in crime of Justin Sullivan, singer with New Model Army) that stabs a knitting needle into the myth of London being the place to go for a band to 'make it' and pops its fascination. Then for good measure stabs it again, just to make sure.

Seven stories in and it's here we hit the obstacle that all similar books of short stories seem to hit. Park Rites, written by Daniel Bennett, is the tale of a teenager planning to expose himself to a woman jogger in a park. His plan is foiled so he instead stabs a deer, a kind of explanation for all this being given in the fact that the boy in some earlier time had been raped by a man in the same park. No-one would deny that such things happen but art created in the form of a short story from such things does not great art make. It's not exactly Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, is it?

The worst submission, however, is Love, by Martyn Waites, and this is due to the shockingly awful stereotyping of the white English working class. There's nothing revelatory in his piece at all, nor humour or anything of the slightest interest; just class prejudice on a stick. No matter if he's working class himself or not, it's just an exercise in Daily Mail hate-speak washed through with a splash of middle class liberalism.

On the other hand, the best submission out of all the stories is Penguin Island by Jerry Sykes because the crime (and the violence) he depicts is casual, malevolent, heartless and very real, so is therefore very believable and actually very touching.

What strange influence London exerts. All those names, all those places, all those landmarks embedded and marked indelibly into us. Names of roads we are all familiar with as the names of our friends without even having been down most of them. We all know these places. They're part of our make-up, our imagination and our collective consciousness. But how? Drawn into us like an osmosis process. Photo-synthesised into our very being.

Perhaps London is just too big and diverse for it to be captured successfully through seventeen short stories without the diversity causing a jarring, clanging sense of disparity in the quality of the writing? Or maybe it is simply the case of some writers just being better than others? If the stories were set in Exmouth, for example, would the book as a whole be better? Maybe. But then probably not.

Exmouth Noir. Now there's a thought.

John Serpico