"Kamilla grinned and head-butted him": A look at Paul Brazill's latest

Back in December 2014, I praised Paul Brazill's Guns of Brixton for not pretending to be "anything but a comic romp, a kind of high-spirited musical without music, albeit one full of violence, the threat thereof, and all sorts of unpleasant bodily effluvia, whether the result of gun blasts or not."

I'm not yet finished reading that novel's follow-up, the brand-new Cold London Blues, but a few snippets suggest that this one will be as much fun as GOB:

"A group of drunken middle-aged men in Manchester United football shirts staggered out of a Thai restaurant shouting racial abuse at an angry looking chef who was chasing them out and wielding a machete.

"‘Ah, Northern scum,’ said Tim. ‘Cultural ambassadors.’

"‘Indeed,’ said Gregor, in the clipped RP English usually only found in 1940s public information films. ‘Unfortunately, at certain times of year, they infest the streets of this great city like lice.’"

and

"Father Tim slammed one of them in the Adam's apple with his fist and then kicked him in the groin."

and

"Kamilla grinned and head-butted him."

Add an occasional jab at Cool Britannia and at noisy cafés, and I feel like I know England even better than I do when I'm there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Bono gets a one-two punch from two top crime writers

(Design by Heads of State)

Poor Bono. Poor, poor Bono.

Here's the beginning of Adrian McKinty's fine new Sean Duffy story, "Shadowboxing" (available free at the Radio Silence site):

"Even the fulminating racists on the far side of the police barriers were temporarily awed into silence by their first sight of the Champ as he stepped nimbly—lepidopterously—from the bus onto the pavement in front of Belfast City Hall. He was bigger than ordinary men, physically, of course, but there was an aura about him, too. Ten years past his prime, heavier, grayer, and with what was apparently early-onset Parkinson’s, this was still the most famous man on the face of the Earth. He was wearing Adidas trainers, a red tracksuit, and sunglasses. He was flanked by two Nation of Islam handlers in dark jackets and bow ties, and a pace behind them was the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a celebrity in his own right in America but a largely unknown figure here, and finally to his left—to no one’s surprise—Bono."

And here's the opening of "The Gumshoe," from Paul D. Brazill's The Gumshoe and Other Brit Grit Yarns:

"In the beginning was the sound. The light came later.

"The sound was a horrifying wail that skewered its way deep into my unconscious brain until I awoke sharply—drowning in sweat, my heart smashing through my ribcage, my head about to burst.

"Some twat, somewhere, was playing a U2 song over and over again ... "

Do you think that, now that the whole world is catching on that Bono is a putz, it may be time to lay off him?

Nah.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Paul D. Brazill's 13 Shots ..., or Noir: I know it when I see it

I don't think much about what noir is or isn't, but every once in a while, as Potter Stewart did with obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, I know it when I see it.

My latest epiphany has come with the opening stories of Paul D. Brazill's 13 Shots of Noir. The stories are all dark, of course, in the sense that their characters do terrible things,  but they are filled with humor, and one even has a happy ending of a kind.

So, what makes Brazill's stories noir? Just this: Better than most authors whose work gets tagged noir, Brazill makes every villain, as the saying goes, a hero in his own story. In addition to the attendant irony and humor, that is apt to fascinate and horrify a reader at the same time. And that, it says here, is one of noir's defining characteristics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Tony Judt's Postwar Europe, with another side trip to Brazill

I've resumed reading Tony Judt's magisterial, awesome, sweeping, magnificent Postwar, a history of Europe since 1945, wrapping up the book's third section, "Recessional: 1971-1989," and beginning its final part, "After the Fall: 1989-2005."

Here's a favorite bit from that third section, Judt summing up Margaret Thatcher and her successor:

"Riding on Thatcher's coat-tails, Tony Blair shared many of her prejudices, albeit in a less abrasive key. Like her, he intensely disliked the old political vocabulary. In his case this meant avoiding all talk of `class,' an antiquated social category displaces in New Labour's rhetorical boilerplate by `race' or `gender.' Like Mrs. Thatcher, Blair showed very little tolerance for decentralized decision-making or internal dissent. Like her, she preferred to surround himself with private-sector businessmen. And although New Labour remained vaguely committed to `society,' its Blairite leadership group was a viscerally suspicious of `the state' as the most doctrinaire of Thatcherites."

His jabs at "rhetorical boilerplate" ought to give pause to anyone tempted to write Judt off as a leftist) (though I think even conservatives have been cowed into using gender as if it were anything other than a grammatical category).    Elsewhere, Judt's respect for Thatcher's accomplishment shines through, whatever horror he may feel at its effect (A publisher's blurb sums up another of his books, Ill Fares the Land, this way: "As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America--the guarantee of security, stability, and fairness--is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it's no longer part of the common discourse.")

Judt wrote with a zest that lets his sympathies shine through, but without ever letting the historian in him degenerate into partisan polemics. But my favorite passage so far is his Gibbonlike footnote to the above observation about Blair's and Thatcher's shared propensity for surrounding themselves with business people:

"With perhaps this difference: whereas Margaret Thatcher believed in privatizaion as something akin to a moral good, Tony Blair just likes rich people."

Who says history can't be fun? (Read all my Postwar posts at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/search?q=judt)

*

Here's a bit more from Paul D. Brazill's Guns of Brixton,  discussed in this space earlier this week, about a feel-good euphemism so widespread that even people older than 30 use it without blushing:

"‘You see, they call them issues these days,’ said Bilko, as he fiddled with an unlit cigarette. ‘Not like issues of comics like The Beano or Shoot or Whizzer and Chips or Razzle, though. Naw, these are things like anger management issues, relationship issues, substance abuse issues. What that means is that these issues are stuff that’s wrong with you. Stuff that fucks you up. And fucked-up people are called people with issues. See?’"

Finally, a thumbs-up to Brazill for knowing that that long chair on which you might relax in sunny weather is a chaise longue.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2014

Guns of Brixton, or the boys from Paul Brazill

Paul D. Brazill explains the title of his novel Guns of Brixton thus:

"When I decided to write a faux London gangster story..."

Faux ... gangster story says much about Guns of Brixton's appeal. The London gangster movies that made a splash a few years back tended to be over-the-top, smirking affairs, and Brazill confronts the over-the-topness by making fun of it, by not pretending his story is anything but a comic romp, a kind of high-spirited musical without music, albeit one full of violence, the threat thereof,  and all sorts of unpleasant bodily effluvia, whether the result of gun blasts or not.  Here are two examples I liked:

"A group of elves holding cans of Special Brew raced past, chased by a wheezing Santa Claus."

and

"If Mad Mack was startled when he saw the shining barrel of a Glock 29 pointing straight at him through the lattice grid, he was certainly too shocked to react before Father Tim Cook muttered: `Sic transit Gloria friggin' Gaynor,' and blasted Mack's brains all over the confessional."

Here's more of Brazill explaining why he chose the title Guns of Brixton:

"... it seemed the sensible thing to take a title from a song by The Clash, that most London of all London bands – even though only one of them was actually born ‘dahn The Smoke.’...And I had plenty of cracking titles to choose from and reject, too – London Calling (been done to death), London’s Burning (reminded me of the naff TV show about firemen), Guns On The Roof ( a silly song about when The Clash were told off for shooting pigeons with an air rifle), Somebody Got Murdered (too obscure), The Last Gang In Town (close, close …) Police & Thieves (Maybe …)"

Now, I was not alienated enough a suburban kid to have regarded the Clash as seminal avatars of anything, but I sure did read a lot or reverent tosh from the typewriters and word processors rock and roll "critics" in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I love Brazill's irreverence.


Any British author setting out to write a gangster story must confront the towering example of Ted Lewis.  Lewis' three  Jack Carter novels are dark, grim, and deadly serious, yet punctuated by grim, delightful humor. Few crime writers can manage that; Derek Raymond, who acknowledged Lewis' influence, is the only other example who comes immediately to mind.

Guns of Brixton does the next best thing: It has tremendous fun with the form while at the same time acknowledging Lewis' fictional world both implicitly (in the novel's several gay or lesbian minor characters) and explicitly (a brief discussion of Michael Caine and the celebrated movie adaptation of Get Carter toward the novel's end). If you love Lewis and the movie, but find Guy Ritchie irritating, you might like Guns of Brixton.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014