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

William Blake - William Vaughan

WILLIAM BLAKE - WILLIAM VAUGHAN

There's William Blake... and all the rest is propaganda.

John Serpico

All Saints - East Budleigh

ALL SAINTS - EAST BUDLEIGH

Am I a geek? Sure, we all like to throw bricks at coppers and burn down the suburbs with a half-closed eye but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As they say. So, in my more contemplative moments I sometimes like to stroll down to the beach and just sit and watch the waves roll in as the ships go by on the horizon. On other occasions I like to take a look at the local churches, not to pray or any such reckless if not ridiculous thing as that but to simply have a mooch around. They're beautiful, ancient, old buildings and I appreciate them – it's as simple as that. If you ask politely and there isn't a health and safety issue, it's surprising how easy it is to even get up to the top of the steeple and look out at the view. It's always worth it.

The church in the village of East Budleigh, in Devon, goes back to before 1420, so it's an old one. Developed and built up a bit since then, of course, there's a lot of history to it not least it being where Walter Raleigh used to go as a child due to his father being the churchwarden. Another famous churchwarden there was Ambrose Stapleton who during his tenure involved almost the whole of the village in smuggling, an activity that was once rife along the nearby coastline and which he apparently organised with great skill.

Within a secret drawer of a communion table, a collection of ancient books were once discovered including bibles dating back to 1634 and a Book of Martyrs describing trials and hideous punishments meted out in that same century to local parishioners.

On all of the bench ends there are wood carvings of various past residents of the village dating back again to the early sixteenth century, along with carvings of coats of arms and angels. There is also a carving of a native American Indian in full headdress. Why? What's he doing there?

Meanwhile out in the churchyard, for such an old church there are surprisingly very few tombstones there. This is simply due, however, to burying past graves under ten feet of mud and starting anew with fresh graves being dug into the newly created mound. Like a high-rise cemetery.

How do I know all this stuff, you might wonder? Well, I've just read the booklet entitled All Saints – East Budleigh, written by Lilian Sheppard, which is basically a guide to the church. Published in 1978, it's probably now long out of print and only available from the dusty bookshelves of second hand shops along the East Coast of Devon. Ignored and not given a second glance apart from people like me.

Am I a geek?

John Serpico

Being There - Jerzy Kosinski

BEING THERE – JERZY KOSINSKI

On the surface, Being There by Jerzy Kosinski seems to be a fairly straightforward story of an idiot savant whose utterings are taken as pearls of wisdom but beneath the surface – like fish seen under the ice – there's something else going on. The story centres upon a gardener by the name of Chance who has spent his whole life living in seclusion, tending the garden of his employer and living in a room in the home of that same employer. Never having ventured beyond the garden's walls he has instead spent his time when not working just watching television, the only people him having any contact with being 'the Old Man' who employs him and the maid. When the Old Man suddenly dies at the start of the book, Chance leaves the house and for the very first time steps out into the wider world.

The house where he has spent his life is in New York and as soon as he walks into the city he is driven into by a chauffeur-driven car. The passenger in the car turns out to be the young wife of an elderly gentleman called Rand, who turns out to be the chairman of the board of the First American Financial Corporation, an elite group of businessmen whose mission is to 'assist American businesses that have been harassed by inflation, excessive taxation, riots, and other indecencies'.

They take Chance into their home so that he may recover from the car accident and it is there that Rand becomes immediately enthralled by Chance's simple, homespun observations wrought from his knowledge of gardening that Rand interprets as uniquely expressed insights into economics and business.

So impressed is he with Chance that Rand introduces him to 'a good friend' who just happens to be the President of the United States of America who subsequently quotes Chance during a speech at a TV press conference. The President name-checks Chance causing immediate interest in this hitherto unknown economics adviser and overnight he becomes a media sensation feted by news pundits, ambassadors of foreign nations and members of the American political and business class.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, particularly to the security services that Chance is a man with no history and no traceable background. There are simply no records at all of him having ever existed before, which then leads them to question as to whether this is a good or a bad thing?

Chance is an innocent abroad, sucked in and swept up by events and circumstances he has little understanding of. But if that's him then who is everyone else? Are all the people Chance encounters simply clutching at straws and searching for meaning when there really isn't any? Including even the President? Is Chance just a blank slate on which everyone hangs their own meaning upon? Their own hopes? Their own needs? Interpreting what Chance says to fit their own personal salvation? Has Jerzy Kosinski written his main character in such a way as to suggest that Chance is indeed a messiah figure?

At the start of the book there is a prominent disclaimer that states 'Any similarity to past or present characters or events is purely accidental, and no identification with any character or event is intended'. The copyright date of the book is 1970 so clearly the President though unnamed is going to be Richard Nixon. The chairman of the First American Financial Corporation is named Rand which is clearly an allusion to Ayn Rand – it's too much of a coincidence for it not to be. The TV talk show host with his audience of millions could well be William F Buckley? Who, however, is Jerzy Kosinski? Well, there's been some debate about that.

At the end of Being There there's an anonymously written synopsis entitled 'On Kosinski' that outlines the author's life and it reads like a piece of magical realism. If only half of it is true then Kosinski has led a charmed and picaresque life through 'some of the strongest direct experience that this century has had to offer'. From poverty in Eastern Europe, war and oppression to wealth, fame and the American liberal elite, he's been through it all apparently. Or has he?

'As I have no children, no family, no relatives, no business or estate to speak of, my books are my only spiritual accomplishment,' he's quoted as saying. Rather like his Chance character in Being There? If Chance is a blank slate, is Kosinski a construct? Which then begs the question, is Being There itself a blank slate without any actual meaning upon which the reader hangs their own meaning? Much like the Chance character himself? Is Being There a very clever book or can cleverness be hung upon it to make it appear clever when it actually isn't clever at all? Is there more to Being There than meets the eye?

I would say 'yes' but like fish seen under the ice it's unclear what it is exactly that's swimming about there beneath its surface. Which all makes for an enjoyable, multi-layered, multi-faceted and very interesting book, to say the least.

John Serpico

Guilty Pleasures (Part 19)

GUILTY PLEASURES (Part 19)

I wonder what a Roxy Music audience looks like? Would it include anyone under the age of forty or might it be solely an over-fifties thing? Might a proportion be lisping, middle-aged homosexuals or balding, pot-bellied ex-lotharios? Would it be a men only thing or would women be equally represented? Who might the men be as in what kind of work might they do as a living? Brick layers, carpenters and navvies or office middle-management and shopkeepers? Who might the women be? Housewives, divorcees, and the kind who work behind the perfume counters at John Lewis and Debenhams? Who knows?

A few of the early Sex Pistols followers were Roxy Music fans – Siouxsie Sioux and the Bromley contingent et al, so there's obviously pedigree there. David Bowie was a fan. Roxy Music always straddled the lines between glam rock kitsch and art school weird with a layer of sexual ambiguity slapped all over them. Brian Eno was always an alien, Andy Mackay was a porn film extra and Bryan Ferry was a lounge lizard. The other two were just Sixties throwbacks painted with a sprinkle of glitter. Though what kind of name is 'Brian' for a pop star? What kind of name is 'Bryan' for an oily, sexually perverted, cocktail bar crooner?

Is it fair to suggest Roxy Music were one of the most interesting yet largely unacknowledged bands of that whole 1970s Top Of The Pops era? Is it fair to suggest that not Virginia Plain, not Street Life, or not any of their hits but a song called If There Was Something from their debut album is one of the greatest songs ever?

There's only one way to find out, I suppose. So see you at the Exmouth Pavilion in January, windowlickers, where an approximation of Roxy Music will be trying to seduce, bugger and abandon a selection of sexually ambivalent farmers and fishermen (along with their fishwives?) from various towns and villages dotted along the East Devon coast. It's going to be the first gig of the year and probably the best gig of the year also...

The Ocean Fell Into The Drop - Terence Stamp

THE OCEAN FELL INTO THE DROP –

TERENCE STAMP

'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night,' as The Kinks once informed us in Waterloo Sunset. Terry being Terence Stamp and Julie being his girlfriend at that time, Julie Christie. And of course he does and will do so forever more through being immortalised in song. Stuck in a moment forever. In perpetuity. No matter that Ray Davies has since denied the song is about them for if anything this serves only to make it all the more strangely frozen in time. Cast in stone.

Terence Stamp is someone who came to define the Sixties and Swinging London in the same way as did others from a similar background such as David Bailey and Michael Caine. Working class chancers all, from impoverishment to the world at their feet in almost a single bound. The Ocean Fell Into The Drop is his memoir and the immediately refreshing thing about it is how you can tell by the quirkiness of the writing that it was actually written by himself rather than it being ghost written. Unlike a lot of books of this type as well, it's not bloated and full of its own self-importance but comes in at only a modest 176 pages.

It's a parody almost of his 1979 film Meetings With Remarkable Men where he played Prince Lubovedsky in the film adaptation of the book of the same name by philosopher and mystic G I Gurdjieff. It's written with good humour and much respect, and like Gurdjieff's book tells the story of his encounters with various remarkable and enchanting people.

As might be expected, during his heyday Terence met them all and dated a fair few of them also: Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, Sarah Miles, Samantha Eggar, John Lennon, Francis Bacon, Ken Loach, Jimi Hendrix, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, Vidal Sassoon, etc, etc. It's a veritable panoply of stars that he waltzes us through, all dearly loved in one way or another. Clearly, he liked his ladies and clearly they liked him back. And why not? Terence was talented, cool, good looking, had beautiful eyes and was a bit of a cheeky chappie. Or as his father is quoted as describing him in full Cockney twang: “Ee's a very lucky boy”.

Of all the people he met and worked with, however, the one who touched him most deeply and had the most impact upon him was Indian philosopher J Krishnamurti, whom Terence met seemingly quite by accident. It was whilst filming in Italy with Federico Fellini that he was invited to a dinner party at which Krishnamurti was also in attendance. It was only years later that Terence discovered that Krishnamurti had specifically requested Terence be invited after seeing film footage of him whilst being entertained previously by Fellini. “I'd like to meet that boy,” Krishnamurti had said to Fellini, and so Terence ended up sitting opposite him at dinner, not quite knowing exactly who Krishnamurti was.

After the dinner, out of all the guests there, it was Terence who was invited for an after-dinner walk with the great sage. Whilst not having spoken during the dinner, strolling along together outside Terence babbled away about general subjects of chit-chat, still not fully understanding who Krishnamurti was.

“Look at that tree,” said Krishnamurti to him, as he touched Terence upon the arm. Terence acknowledged it and continued chatting away. “Look at that cloud,” said Krishnamurti, again touching Terence upon the arm. Again Terence acknowledged it and continued chatting, slightly confused as to why Krishnamurti's main engagement in conversation with him was to highlight a tree and a cloud. The effect upon Terence from this meeting and this apparently one-way conversation would prove, however, to be profound.

All other encounters with remarkable people over the course of his career are almost superfluous to this initial encounter with Krishnamurti and it sets him on a path that he has remained on ever since, even during the periods when his film career had ground to a near halt.

With the end of the Sixties came the end of film offers, due apparently to Terence being so closely associated with that decade and the world having moved on. Subsequently, Terence spent much of the Seventies in India searching - for want of a better word - for enlightenment. For a time he even became a sannyasen under the tutorship of 'controversial' Indian guru Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh. Throughout this whole time, from afar Krishnamurti continued to keep an eye on him.

Throughout the book, Terence offers up anecdotes about all the people he gets to meet, the most amusing concerning Marlon Brando on the set of Superman where Brando has arrived with an entourage of two sisters. “See those two girls over there,” Brando says to Terence “They want your dick”.

At one point in the book he tells us of the time when he asked Krishnamurti what it was like when Krishnamurti first experienced total consciousness, or illumination. Krishnamurti considered the question for a moment and then replied “The ocean fell into the drop”. Hence the title of the book. It's a good, almost perfect Krishnamurti quote and as it's been used as the title for Terence's memoir, it's worth considering.

'The ocean fell into the drop' is a simple but at the same time very clever statement, the reverse of course, of 'the drop fell into the ocean', and very easy to grasp the meaning of. Is it, however, what might be called an 'absolute truth'? Almost, I would say, but not quite.

If there is an ocean and if there is a drop it implies an imbalance, the greater weight and the greater capacity being with the ocean. Both the ocean and the drop, however, are of equal importance and of equal measure in the meaning to each other. One is not complete without the other. The vessel holding both the ocean and the drop – whether that be the Universe or the singular person – is not completely full or not whole without being full to the last drop. Without the ocean, the drop is not complete and without the drop, the ocean is not complete. Understanding the importance of the ocean to the drop and the drop to the ocean leads to wholeness and balance – and perfect balance at that.

Krishnamurti never declared himself to be The Light, he did the complete opposite, in fact. All he did was to point the way to The Light. With this in mind, it's easy to see why Krisnamurti gently admonished Terence on learning of his travels in India seeking out various gurus and his association with the sannyasens: “You don't find this in a supermarket” he tells Terence.

Why Krishnamurti took an interest in this young actor by the name of Terence Stamp rather than anyone else at the dinner party where they met (and remember this party included such luminaries as one of the greatest film directors of all time, Federico Fellini) remains unclear even to Terence. Perhaps he saw in Terence a kindred soul? Whatever the reason, to have had Krishnamurti keeping an eye on you throughout life is one of the most blessed gifts. Summed up, indeed, by what Terence's father – an ordinary, uneducated, working class tugboat man from East London – had deduced very early on at the start of his son's film career and without any need to travel to India to seek out gurus: “Ee's a very lucky boy”....

John Serpico

Pan - Knut Hamsun

PAN – KNUT HAMSUN

If ever a book can be said to be heavy with symbolism then it is Pan by Knut Hamsun. On the surface it's the story of a love affair conducted over a summer between a hunter who lives alone in a hut in the woods and the daughter of a local merchant in a coastal village in northern Norway. All well and good and all very Scandinavian but it's only once you come to the end of it that you think: 'Hang on, what is this I've just read?'.

Pan is indeed the story of a love affair but it is also about the chasm and even the clash between nature and civil society. It's about perception and interpretation. It's about sex and love and the joining of the two but also about separation. It's a bee dance but with people rather than insects moving and circling around each other. It's about not knowing what to do with love when it happens. It's about the beauty of love but how it also causes pain and damage. It's about being touched by love and never being able to recover. It's about the flitting in a blink of an eye between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and dream, and truth and illusion. It's about messages communicated by actions. It's about communication via objects. It's about life in all its glory and all its knotted, bound-up frustration. It's about the beauty of the world and the ugliness within it. It's about free will. It's about contradiction, suspicion, confusion, despair, jealousy, worthiness, nature, the seasons, attrition, fragmentation, self-destruction, lust, obsession, exultation, paranoia, rivalry, pride, and sorrow.

That's all.

Whilst on the subject of Knut Hamsun, there's a conversation to be had here regarding artists, their work, their personal lives and their politics, and whether the three can or even should be separated? It's a very old debate that crops up every year or so and has just recently surfaced again.

There's a scene in The Joker where Joaquin Phoenix dances down a flight of steps to the tune of Gary Glitter's old song, Rock'n'Roll Part 2. It's well choreographed and the music fits the scene perfectly. The question being, however, that should a song by a convicted paedophile have been used at all? The answer was that Gary Glitter holds no publishing rights to the song so he wouldn't make any money from it, and that also in America the same song is often played at football matches so is viewed in a different context to how it's viewed in England.

In a recent essay, Nick Cave wrote disparagingly about anti-fascists, suggesting they are in a mutually self-sustaining marriage with the Far Right. Cave's political naivety was embarrassing and displayed a complete lack of understanding of the danger presented by the Far Right if not challenged. Could his lack of political insight be kept apart from his art or did it represent a shadow now cast upon it?

In regards to Knut Hamsun, it turns out that this towering figure in Norwegian literacy and according to Charles Bukowski “the greatest writer who has ever lived” was a supporter of Hitler, though there's no indication of this in any of his books. For Norwegians, this has apparently been the cause of endless grief for them that they've wrestled with ever since, trying to separate their world-famous writer from his political beliefs.

Does now knowing this about Hamsun colour his books? Yes, of course it does. In the same way that if Hamsun had been a vocal or even physical opponent of the Nazis it would surely enhance his books - or the reception of them at least. In the same way that you can blind taste wine you can also read books, hear music or watch films with one eye closed. Once the blind-fold is lifted, however, there is no escape from the truth which then leads to the dilemma. The saving grace is that the decision made as to whether you continue reading, listening or viewing or whether the art has been spoilt forever is a personal one. These questions are the stuff of being human. The stuff, in a way, of Knut Hamsun's writings

John Serpico