The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

I complained last week of having read a run of dud books, but this brilliant debut proved a glorious exception. I picked it up on a whim when passing the recommended titles pile in the local library and was hooked from the off.

Dissolute Glasgow auctioneer Rilke gets a lucky break when he’s offered the contents of a big house for clearance. It’s easy money, the furniture and nick-nacks are of high quality and he’s bound to make a tidy sum in fees. The elderly lady who has hired him is clearing the house for her recently deceased brother. She only asks that Rilke will be discreet. Of course he will...

Up in the old boy’s bedroom Rilke finds a hatch into an attic. With keys for the whole building, he makes his way up the ladder:

I was standing in a long, thin room, perhaps half the length of the house. Bare floorboards, clean for an attic. The ceiling began midway up the walls, angling to a peak. Three small windows that would let in a little light during the day. Along the right-hand wall were racks of metal shelving holding tidily stacked cardboard boxes. The left wall was covered in waist-high, dark oak bookcases, books neatly arranged. In the centre were a plain office desk and a chair, to their left a high-backed armchair, comfortable but scruffy, inherited from some other room, beside it a bottle of malt, Lagavulin. Dead man’s drink. I unscrewed the cap and inhaled a quick scent of iodine and peat which caught the back of my throat. It was the good stuff, right enough. There was no cup so I too the end of my shirt and rubbed it along the mouth of the bottle before taking a good slug.

Rilke has stumbled on an Aladdin’s cave of pornography and erotica. Worth a pretty penny some of it as well, although he’s been sworn to secrecy if he finds anything scandalous. Even so, he gives the drawers and boxes a good going over. He finds a strange card for a ‘camera club’ before realising it’s probably time to knock off for the day:

I considered stopping, almost left right there. It was the whisky that drew me back. One more drink, leave the van in the driveway until morning, last orders at the Melrose, then a walk through the park and see what gave. It was the good stuff. A reward for working so hard, being clever enough to arrange a big deal, a pat on the back from me to me. I should have known myself: that bottle was too full and I was too empty.

His next discovery is a bundle of sexually horrific photographs. Ignoring his better judgement to leave well alone, Rilke decides to investigate, and begins a disturbing journey into Glasgow’s underworld...

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I had McCarthy’s The Road inflicted on me as a reading group choice, and plodded my way from start to finish without ever taking to it. The post-apocalyptic shtick grated from page one, but I found myself dragged to the end of the book by McCarthy’s spare style. Despite all the rude things I have said since about The Road, I said that I was determined to revisit his writing, and I finally took out No Country For Old Men from the library to make good on my promise.

Set in 1980, it starts with a man coming across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong in a deserted location on the Texas-Mexico border. He finds a case with over $2,000,000 in it and takes the rather hasty decision to nick off with the cash. After that, he’s on the run from a bloodthirsty Mexican drug gang, and the even more deadly and relentless Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic hit-man whose preferred method of execution is a metal bolt gun normally used for dispatching cattle at the abattoir.

Realising pretty quickly that he’s in a world of trouble, Llewellyn Moss, the unwilling fugitive with the cash, is chased from motel to motel across Southern Texas as the body count stacks up behind him. Finally, after being shot and injured and patched up again in a Mexican border town, he tries to arrange a secret assignation with his wife, also in hiding. On the way he picks up a hitchhiker, a fifteen year old runaway. Tempted into a rare bout of sociability, Moss gets a couple of cold beers when they’re staying at a motel:

He walked down to her room and tapped at the door. He waited. He tapped again. He saw the curtain move and then she opened the door. She stood there in the same jeans and T-shirt. She looked like she’d just woken up.
I know you aint old enough to drink but I thought I’d see if you wanted a beer.
Yeah, she said. I’d drink a beer.
He lifted one of the cold bottles out of the brown paper bag and handed it to her. Here you go, he said.
He’d already turned to go. She stepped out and let the door shut behind her. You don’t need to rush off thataway, she said.
He stopped on the lower step.
You got another one of these in that sack?
Yeah, I got two more. And I aim to drink both of em.
I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me.
He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think it starts about age three.

Not exactly a conversationalist, Moss gets stuck into his brew:

He sat on the step and pulled one of the beers from the bag and twisted off the cap and tilted the bottle and drank. She sat on the step next up and did the same.
You sleep a lot? he said.
I sleep when I get the chance. Yeah. You?
I aint had a night’s sleep in about two weeks. I don’t know what it would feel like. I think it’s beginnin to make me stupid.

It’s a bit late to worry about that. With luck he’ll have time to enjoy the beer before Chigurh and the Mexicans catch up with him.

There’s a lesson to be learned here: if ever you find yourself in the Texas desert next to a lot of dead bodies, a bale of heroin and a satchel full of used dollar bills, walk away. Just walk away...

Dead Simple by Peter James

I have harboured a lifelong mistrust of stag nights and reading Peter James Brighton based crime novel hasn’t exactly made me change my mind. Detective Superintendant Roy Grace finds himself investigating the aftermath of a particularly messy night out which has left four men dead and one missing.

The stag and his mates have started the evening off with a pub crawl and a fairly bibulous one at that. Still, at least they’ve had the sense to keep a designated driver, Rob:

With three pubs notched up already in the past hour and a half, and four more on the itinerary, he was sticking to shandy. At least, that head been his intention; but he’d managed to slip down a couple of pints of pure Harvey’s bitter – to clear his head for the task of driving, he’d said.

In the back of the van, the stag, Michael, is blissfully unaware that his friends are up to no good and that there might be mischief afoot:

Michael, lolling on a tartan rug on the floor in the back of the van, was feeling very pleasantly woozy. “I sh’ink I need another drink,” he slurred. If he’d had his wits about him, he might have sensed, from the expressions of his friends, that something was not quite right. Never usually much of a heavy drinker, tonight he’d parked his brains in the dregs of more empty pint glasses and vodka chasers than he could remember downing, in more pubs than had been sensible to visit.

The stag night gag is that his mates have procured a coffin, which Michael gets put into and buried alive in a hole in the Ashdown Forest. The scamps! He won’t be there for long as they’ll only be going to another pub for an hour or so before letting him out, and they’ve left him a flashlight, a walkie-talkie, some porn and a bottle of scotch...

Unfortunately, Michael’s charming friends meet with a bit of an accident on their way to the next watering hole and in a scene straight out of a ‘don’t drink and drive’ campaign, plough straight into the front of a cement truck, killing them instantly. Michael is going to be down there a bit longer than anticipated:

He was desperate for water, his mouth arid and furry. Had they left him any water? He lifted his neck up just the few inches that were available before his head struck the lid, saw the glint of the bottle, reached down. Famous Grouse whisky. Disappointed, he broke the seal, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. For a moment just the sensation of liquid felt like balm in his mouth; then it turned to fire, burning his mouth, then his gullet. But almost instantly after that he felt a little better. He took another swig. Felt a little better still, and took a third, long swig before he replaced the cap.

After a couple of days, it’s getting obvious that his friends aren’t coming back, so Michael starts to dig himself out with the only tool he has:

He picked up the whisky bottle. Still a third of its contents left. He struck the top of the bottle hard against the wood above him. Nothing happened. He tried again, heard a dull thud. A tiny sliver of glass sheared off. Tragic to waste it. He put the neck into his mouth, tilted it, swallowed a mouthful of the burning liquid. God, it tasted good, so good. He lay back, up-ended the bottle into his mouth and let it pour in, swallowing, swallowing, swallowing until he choked.

Having to dig yourself out of a coffin with a broken bottle sounds bad enough, but things are about to get a lot more complicated for investigating officer Grace, and a lot worse for Michael, who is definitely not going to make it to the church on time...

In The Woods by Tana French

I seem to be reading more crime fiction lately; not necessarily a bad thing. The genre relies heavily on strong plot and characterisation, tools of writing that always bear further study. There’s often a lot of booze as well...

French’s debut is written through the eyes of Dublin DI Rob Ryan, a man who admits at the start of the book that he tells lies, a man who is also falling apart under the weight of his own past. More than partial to drinking solitary vodka, he keeps a private stash in his room:

I poured myself a drink – I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books...

Working on a case involving a murdered child, Ryan is getting too close for comfort to his detective partner, Cassie Maddox, and when it transpires that the body has been found in the same wood where two of his childhood friends disappeared over twenty years before, he finally loses his grip on reality. After nearly punching a suspect during an interview, he decides that the best thing to do is get drunk.

I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I’d been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realised that, while the nausea showed now signs of getting better, it probably wasn’t going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on the covers without taking off my clothes.

It goes downhill from here for Ryan and his subsequent flashback in the woods brings about a near breakdown. He finishes the book in professional and personal torment and the bottle seems to be his only friend:

I....locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly and purposefully, until four in the morning.

French’s characters are the strongest part of the book, and in Rob Ryan she gives us a palpable examination of a troubled soul.

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham

I’m not a regular reader of crime fiction and would probably not have strayed from my usual beat of Ian Rankin and Agatha Christie had Caroline Graham’s books not been dramatised as the highly successful series Midsomer Murders. Watching a repeat of an early episode prompted me to pick up the source material from the library.

The book starts with a missing person. Simone Hollingsworth, wife of a local businessman, disappears from their home in Fawcett Green. Her vanishing act causes her husband to lock himself in the house and hit the bottle, although he doesn’t go so far as to call the police and tell them his wife has gone. The vicar, dropping by to ask why she has missed bell ringing practice, notices that he’s in a bit of a state:

“Now Alan,” said the vicar, “If I may call you that?” His kindly glance was momentarily distracted by the sight of a splendid silver tray holding two cut-glass decanters and several bottles including a Jack Daniel’s, nearly full, and a Bushmills, half empty. There was no way, on his stipend, the vicar could afford either of these splendid beverages. He heaved himself upright again saying, “You look as if you could do with a drink...”

Obviously Hollingsworth thinks so to and very quickly reports come back that he’s living off microwave food and whiskey:

Later, further verification of Alan Hollingsworth’s debauched state was provided when a stream of bottles descended from his wheelie bin into the masticating maw of Causton Borough Council’s refuse lorry. Avis Jennings said it sounded as if someone was disposing of a greenhouse. The vicar, put in the picture by his spouse, thought of all that Jack Daniel’s consumed in lonely isolation and wondered if he should once more attempt to offer solace.

Eventually the local plod are asked to check on him, and more importantly, Simone. Hollingsworth opens the door to the village bobby:

“You’re plainly not very well, sir.” “I’m pissed, you stupid idiot...” Hollingsworth picked up the nearest bottle, which was uncapped, poured a stream of liquid into a smeary tumbler and sloshed it down.

It’s soon after this that Causton CID are involved and the book’s hero, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is on the scene. Though when they get to the house it’s a little too late for Hollingsworth:

A man was lying on a brightly coloured rug in front of an empty fireplace. Barnaby crossed quickly over and knelt beside him. Troy stood on the threshold, his fastidious nature affronted by the mixture of stale offensive odours about the place, not least of which came from the pool of urine beneath the recumbent figure. Troy noticed a tumbler lying on its side a short distance from the man’s right hand.

It’s clear to the DCI that foul play is afoot:

...Barnaby felt certain that Alan Hollingsworth had not succumbed to a stroke or heart attack. Or alcohol poisoning even though, according to Perrot, he’d been lowering gallons of the stuff for days.

When Polaroids of Simone appear showing that she’s been abducted, the plot thickens... It’s great stuff and frequently very funny, but having been spoiled by over a decade of John Nettles chewing scenery, I’m having trouble adjusting to Graham’s original creation.

Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor

Alcohol is not just for diversion into anecdote in books, it can serve move the plot as well. One of the author’s greatest fears is (or certainly should be!) the dumping of large amounts of factual content in one go, pages and pages of detail that leaves the reader numb and flicking forward to the beginning of the next chapter. This is where a couple of libations can really come to the rescue...

Take this example from Andrew Taylor’s Bleeding Heart Square. I picked this out of the library because I work a couple of minutes walk away from many of the locations, and because I’d seen a review which mentioned that one of the main characters was a lush, therefore making it ideal blogging material.

In two pages, Taylor demonstrates how to use a bottle of wine to introduce some back story and a bit of characterisation:

At that moment there came a tap at the door.

“Come in,” cried Ingleby-Lewis, and struggled to his feet.

The door opened, revealing Malcolm Fimberry on the threshold with a bottle of wine cradled in his arms.

“I say,” he squeaked. “Sorry to disturb you. I – I thought I might open some wine and I wondered if I could borrow a corkscrew.”

“Wine, eh?” Ingleby-Lewis sprang towards him. “Nothing simpler, old man. Come in and sit down. Lydia, my dear, would you find Mr Fimberry a corkscrew in the kitchen?”

“If you would like to join me in a glass,” Fimberry suggested, “I’d be more than pleased.”

“How very kind.” Ingleby-Lewis patted him on the shoulder and removed the bottle from his grasp. “Three glasses as well then, please, Lydia. Ah, a Beaujolais, I see. How very wise. You’re quite right of course – solitary drinking is not something one should encourage. Besides, life holds few finer pleasures than a glass of wine with friends.”

When Lydia returned with three unmatched glasses and a corkscrew, she found her father and Mr Fimberry sitting on either side of the fireplace and smoking Mr Fimberry’s cigarettes. Her father took the corkscrew and removed the cork with a skill born of long experience. He poured a stream of wine into the nearest glass.

“None for me, thank you,” Lydia said.

“Nonsense,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “Just a sip. Do you good. Warm you up.” He turned to Fimberry. “My daughter feels the cold, you know. Especially at night.” He measured a thimbleful into he smallest of the glasses and handed it ceremoniously to Lydia. He gave another glass to Fimberry and the largest one to himself. He raised his own glass to the light. “A fine colour. Your good health.” He swallowed a third of the contents.

“I hear you have a position at Shires and Trimble in Rosington Place, Mrs Langstone,” Fimberry said, leaning towards her. “That must be interesting. Working for a solicitor, I mean.”

“It’s early days yet,” Lydia said grimly.

“You’re just opposite the chapel, of course. In fact, as far as I can work out from an eighteenth-century plan of the palace, the house where Shires and Trimble are must be built over part of the Almoner’s lodging. Remarkable to think of the people who must have walked about here in their time. Good Queen Bess, Sir Thomas More, Richard the Third, John of Gaunt, all those splendid prelates of the Church. Why, we walk on history in this part of London. And that’s why we Mr Howlett to guard our gates and keep order. In legal terms, Rosington Place, Bleeding Heart Square and their environs form the Rosington Liberty, and hence in many respects they still fall under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rosington.”

“Very true,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “A spot more? No?” He refilled his own glass. “You must know the place like the back of your hand.”

Mr Fimberry simpered, his eyes huge behind his pince-nez. “Oh, there are some fascinating stories associated with it, no doubt about that. After the Reformation, the Catholic dead were sometimes secretly interred beneath the chapel, in the days when the palace was rented to the Spanish ambassador. It is said that the bodies were brought here to Bleeding Heart Square, and then transferred to the chapel in Rosington Place. They were secretly buried at midnight, to the accompaniment of solemn masses, beneath the undercroft floor.

“Extraordinary yarn,” Ingleby-Lewis said, his eyes straying again towards the bottle.

In just under 600 words the reader now knows that Ingleby-Lewis is a soak, the gloriously Dickensian Mr Fimberry is a funny sort who buys a bottle of wine when he doesn’t own a corkscrew and bothers his neighbours using it as an excuse for a chat and the chapel on Rosington Place, which features later on in the story, is introduced, along with its history, without boring the reader to tears. Simple, when it’s done well...

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The ultimate hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon and its subsequent screen versions (most famously with Humphry Bogart) brought the tough, morally ambiguous, chain smoking and hard-drinking PI into the public consciousness.

Sam Spade is a small time private investigator in San Fancisco who is asked by the beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy to track down her errant sister. He sends his partner Miles out on the job, but that night the other man is shot dead and it quickly transpires that their commission wasn’t what it seemed. Called out by the police when they find Miles’s body, it’s well into the small hours when he gets back to his apartment:

Spade’s tinny alarm-lock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-door-bell rang. The hands of the alarm clock registered four-thirty.

The visitors are the police again, this time trying to insinuate that Spade has something to do with Miles’s murder. The next day, he’s visited by a sinister Levantine by the name of Joel Cairo who asks him if he knows the whereabouts of a black metal figurine in the form of a falcon, then pulls a gun on him... A drink is required after this sort of intrusion:

For half an hour after Joel Cairo had gone Spade sat alone, still and frowning, at his desk. The he said aloud in tone of one dismissing a problem, “Well, they’re paying me for it,” and took a bottle of Manhattan cocktail and a paper drinking-cup from the desk-drawer. He filled the cup two-thirds full, drank, returned the bottle to the drawer, tossed the cup into the wastebasket, put on his hat and overcoat, turned off the lights, and went down to the night-lit street.

Spade finally gets to see the man behind the mystery, the obese Mr. Gutman who tells him the story of the Maltese Falcon, a fabulously valuable jeweled statuette that has been painted black to hide its value. Not before pouring him a Johnny Walker and soda, of course:

Spade sat in the green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street. “We start well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

Sage advice. That said, none of the people Spade has met are to be trusted at all, drink or no drink. What follows is a masterpiece of suspense and two-fisted action and one of the best crime novels ever written.

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

I found myself browsing the crime shelves again and dug out this nugget of hard boiled fiction from one of Britain’s overlooked writers, Derek Raymond. He wrote five books in the ‘Factory’ series about an unnamed detective sergeant in the ‘Department of Unexplained Deaths’.

Left with the unloved and the unmissed cases that never make the news, the detective is investigating the murder of a middle aged drunk, Charles Staniland, found brutally beaten to death in West London. There’s not much to go on at first, just a face, (what’s left of it), a few letters and a stack of audio cassettes in his squalid flat:

He was a drinker, too – you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn’t go with the cheap suit he was found in. What the hell had the man been doing?

Listening to the tapes, the DS discovers that Staniland was a regular at the Agincourt, a rough pub in Lewisham, where he drank heavily, despite the mocking and casual violence from a local criminal whom he nicknamed the Laughing Cavalier. Our man goes to investigate:

Inside, the place was built entirely of concrete, which nevertheless bore signs of attention from various demented customers. The bar was narrow, and behind it stood an unbelievably disagreeable-looking stout man, who had to be the governor. It was only a quarter past eleven in the morning; however, as I came in, he was helping himself to a triple vodka, obviously not his first in the day.

His queries paint a picture of a talented man, ruined by a marriage that didn’t work out and the subsequent flight of his wife and daughter. Staniland was even a scriptwriter at the BBC once, although the booze tempered his success:

“Well, he drank,” said Viner, “And I mean he really drank. The Beeb’s idea of drinking in the office is an occasional pale ale – Charles’s was a bottle of Scotch a day. Or two. Mind, he never passed out; his eyes just used to turn inward. I remember he was sick in his handkerchief once, but he was never incoherent, even. The bottle would be on his desk out in the open, and if a passing bigwig didn’t like it – well, Charles had rather a sharp tongue.”

The tapes refer to an antagonistic and abusive relationship with a woman called Barbara whom the DS is soon convinced holds the answer as to why Stanliland was killed. While his search for her combs the sleazy nightclubs of South London, he continues to listen to the tapes, finally discovering Staniland’s fatal raison d’être:

Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with mine open. We all instinctively try to make death less difficult for ourselves. Personally, I’ve got two ways. First, I drink. I drink for oblivion, and then a fall of some kind of blow, once I’m beyond thinking and feeling. That’s how I’d die, with my eyes shut. My other way is to rationalize my experience.

Looking into his own past, the DS is reminded of an artist whose wife has gone insane:

“She looks at naked existence all the time, you know, the way we only do with a bad hangover.”

The Detective is now far too involved; identifying with Staniland to the point that he even moves in with the woman who brought him down, an action that could cost him his own life...

Brutal and unflinching in its description of evil, He Died With His Eyes Shut is also an acutely sharp and uncomfortable insight into the human condition. With echoes of Hamilton’s Hangover Square, the Factory series are a piece of cult London fiction that I know I’ll be returning to.

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

I was recommended this on the strength of its descriptions of Aberdeen, and some rather fanciful depictions of the local paper aside, it paints a realistic sounding picture of the Granite City, a conurbation of pubs, churches and rain. Three things Aberdeen had in abundance.

DS Logan is back at work after a year off sick. His first case is the body of a missing child, found mutilated and badly decomposed. As the weather gets steadily worse the body count starts to rise. Grampian Police are overstretched and unable to make a breakthrough. Sometimes, it seems, when the going gets tough, the tough have to slip out to the pub after work:

Archibald Simpson’s had started life as a bank, the large banking floor transformed into the main bar. The ornate ceiling roses and high cornices were blurred above a fug of cigarette smoke, but the crowd were more interested in the cheap drinks than the architectural details.

Naturally, they’re there to talk shop:

They’d spent the first third of the evening talking in serious tones about the dead and missing children. The second third had been spent bitching about the Professional Standards investigation into the leaking of information to the press. Changing their name from Complaints and Discipline hadn’t made them any more popular. And the last third getting seriously drunk. One of the PCs – Logan couldn’t remember his name – lurched back to the table with another round of beers. The constable was entering that stage of drunkenness when everything seemed very funny, giggling as half a pint of lager went all over the table and down the leg of a bearded CID man.

Logan, with no intention of being the responsible adult that night, gets himself thoroughly pickled, a situation not exactly assisted by the painkillers he’s still taking; one four times a day, not to be taken with alcohol. The evening gets messy, the morning after is worse:

Six o’clock and the alarm’s insistent bleeping dragged Logan out of his bed and into a blistering hangover. He slumped at the side of the bed, holding his head in his hands, feeling the contents swell and throb. His stomach was gurgling and churning with lurching certainty. He was going to be sick. With a grunt he staggered to the bedroom door and out into the hall, making for the toilet.

If that’s not bad enough, he seems to have several coppers wandering around his flat in a state of hungover bewilderment:

“Mornin’, sir. Good party last night. Thanks for putting us up.” “Er... Don’t mention it.” Party?

Still, at least he gets a bacon sandwich for breakfast:

Logan sat back from the table, chewing on his bacon buttie, trying to remember what the hell happened last night. He couldn’t remember any party. Everything was pretty much a blank after the pub. And some of the stuff before that was none too clear either. But apparently he’d had a party and some of the search team had crashed at his place. That made sense. His flat was on Marischal Street: two minutes’ walk from Queen Street and Grampian Police Headquarters. But he still couldn’t remember anything after they were chucked out of the pub. The PC currently throwing up in his toilet – Steve – had stuck Queen’s ‘A Kinda Magic’ on the jukebox and promptly taken off all his clothes. It couldn’t be called a striptease. There was no teasing and too much staggering round like a drunken lunatic. The bar staff had kindly asked them to leave.

With this crack team on the case, the rest of the investigation will be a breeze.

Twelve Step Fandango by Chris Haslam

Be careful what you wish for. Martin Brock, a lowlife drug dealer working the Costa del Sol, dreams of a motorbike and a big stash of cocaine that will set him up for life and get him away from his home in a ruined Spanish hill castle and his crazy German girlfriend, Luisa. Then both the bike and the charlie turn up on the same day...


It’s fair to say that Martin’s use of recreational drugs and drink might have hampered his ability to make the right decision in a crisis. The day a runaway Parisian drug mule arrives with his ticket to a better life, he’s already fuddled:

Within the space of ninety late-afternoon minutes I had snorted up a quarter gram of coke, smoked an eighth of that blinding kif, and then knocked back half a pint of 80-proof home-grown aguardiente. It was reasonable to expect that I might be feeling a little off-centre...

When the Frenchman dies, Martin discovers an unbelievable quantity of very good cocaine hidden on the man’s bike. Now set for the big time, there’s just one thing to sort out; informing the unfortunate man’s next of kin. Who just might know what their lad was up to and want their property back.

Before long, Martin realises that he’s a very small fish in a very nasty pond. Desperate to get shot of the haul, he’s persuaded to go to Cadiz to meet with a contact who might be able to shift the drugs. Having hidden the cocaine in a ruined farmhouse, he’s out of toot and trying to wash away the twin horrors of jangled nerves that need cocaine and travelling with the equally irritable Luisa by drinking more fire water:

I necked the shot and left them... feeling light-headed, unsteady and frustrated as I stumbled into the lamplit alley. Something unravelled deep in my gut, blinked and belched an acid spray against my colon, sending my knotty quadriceps into spasm and causing my knees to tremble. I stood for a moment with my brow pushed against the cool glass of a milliner’s window, blaming my pain on that last glass of aguardiente.

He’s in a mess, and he knows it:

Too much alcohol had been consumed in too short a time as a result of there being no cocaine available to make life more bearable.

Unfortunately for Martin, things are just about to get a lot, lot worse...

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard

I had the privilege of reviewing one of Elmore Leonard’s books a while back for the FT, so while leafing around the library looking for inspiration, I decided to pick up something from his extensive back catalogue.

Rum Punch is probably better known through Quentin Tarantino’s film adaptation Jackie Brown, which is a shame, because it’s a tightly written crime thriller that is more than worth investigating in its own right.

Odell Robbie sells guns to criminals, but his operation is under the surveillance of the feds and when they arrest Jackie Burke who ships his money into Miami from the Caribbean he’s under pressure to get her out of the picture, fast.

Unfortunately for Odell, some of his accomplices don’t work to his level of professionalism. Louis Gara, for example; a three time jailbird who knows Odell from Detroit. Louis has lost his edge since he’s been inside:

Four years staring at the walls and drinking shine, the man was burnt out, useless.

You see, in this business, you have to stay sharp:

Louis was thinking he should not drink rum. Or he should find a glass and have another one... He had started this afternoon in the bar at the Ocean Mall, Casey’s, hiding out from Melanie, thinking of her as a female cannibal. Bourbon this afternoon, rum this evening, nothing to eat in between...

So when the final pick up takes place and Louis has to get back to his car, he needs to remember where he’s left it:

Sometimes when he was living in South Beach and drinking a lot he’d forget where he parked and have to roam up and down the streets. He’d had a few pops this afternoon before he’d picked her up.

That kind of sloppiness will get you more than a hangover. Let’s just say, Louis doesn’t get to go to prison a fourth time...

The Take by Martina Cole

Returning to a gangland theme, I recently picked up a copy of Martina Cole’s The Take, a story of organised crime and family betrayal from Britain’s best selling author. I was drawn to Cole by this fantastic interview in The Guardian ('The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes') and finally got about to taking one of her novels out of the library.


The Take follows the life of career criminal Freddie Jackson, East End ‘face’ and drink and drug fuelled nutter. Freddie puts away the sauce, but not quite to the same degree as his long suffering wife, Jackie, who is slipping into alcohol dependency. Finally, it looks like Freddie has gone too far, even for Jackie. At eleven in the morning, self-destruction beckons:

She burped, and tasted the tannic cheapness of the wine, then she topped up the glass and drank once more. She need oblivion and she knew that today of all days it was not to be hers. This was far too serious to anaesthetise with wine or vodka. This needed brandy or even whisky.

There are some great descriptions of the ravages of booze throughout the book: A copper with the beer gut and the weather beaten look of a man who had drunk too much too soon, the electric pain of a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, there’s a cracking one when Freddy’s best friend wakes up after his stag night:

The night before was a complete blank, and he know that was how this was meant to be. He had been drinking brandy and port, a lethal combination, and he felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a billiard ball in a sock.

For all the heavy drinking and drug taking, the swearing and the ultraviolence, The Take is at heart a morality tale about hubris and nemesis. And I’m enjoying every minute of it.

The Long Firm by Jake Arnott

I picked up Arnott’s The Long Firm from a bookshop not long after it was published and was highly impressed by this ambitious first novel which consists of five separate stories, all revolving around a fictional gangster, Harry Starks.


Of the five pieces, the longest, and to my mind the most impressive, follows the last few months of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the man whose murder eventually caused the arrest and conviction of the Kray Twins.

A gun-for-hire for both the Krays and Harry Starks, McVitie is spiralling out of control in London’s underworld. Addicted to amphetamines and drinking heavily, his behaviour is increasingly unreliable and unpredictable. That said, everyone around him is wasted on speed and booze, it’s just McVitie is a hell of a lot worse.

Taken to a nightclub to see Dorothy Squires, Jack notices she’s been at the sauce:

Dorothy’s taking swigs from a bottle between numbers. Pretending it’s water, I suppose. It’s obviously booze. Looks like she’s had a few already. Harry looks a bit concerned. Unprofessional, he’d call it. “She’s pissed Jack,” he says a bit affronted.

Jack’s not exactly sober himself. He goes on to heckle Squires, then perform an impromptu striptease on the stage before getting thrown out of the club.

Arnott colours his book with the ugly side of the 1960s. Jack gets the brush off from Harry, who is going through his own crisis:

Winston Churchill on the gramophone when I go round to see Harry. Bad sign. Empty bottles of Stematol and Napoleon brandy lying around. Anti-depressants with cognac chasers, a desperate attempt to stave off his gloomy madness.

McVitie ought to know about desperation. He turns up at the Kray’s club thoroughly drunk with a badly concealed sawn-off shotgun under his jacket. He’s persuaded to leave:

Push myself off the bar. Nearly tumble over onto the floor. Stumble out.

Jacks’ number is about to come up. On 29 October 1967 he’s lured to a flat in Stoke Newington where the Krays are waiting. The last line in the story goes to Ron Kray: “Do him!”

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

I quickly became hooked on Patricia Highsmith’s books last year and read three in rapid succession. Strangers on a Train was the third one I picked up; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, it is probably her most famous after the series of Ripley novels.


Guy Haines meets Charles Bruno on a train and lets slip in conversation that he is going to Metcalfe, Texas to sort out a divorce with his estranged wife, who is pregnant by another man. The dissolute Bruno, clearly smitten by Guy, decides to help him out and travels down to Texas after him and kills the unfortunate woman. When the innocent Guy is finally out of police suspicion, Bruno makes a reappearance in his life, blackmailing him into murdering his father.

Of the two protagonists, Bruno is the more interesting; clearly unhinged, he is dangerously alcoholic as well as allowing his intense feelings for Guy to destroy the poor man’s life. His relationship with his mother is straight out of Freud, (I almost expected him to blind himself at the end, but that would simply have confirmed Anouilh’s theory that Oedipus was a melodramatic...) but his relationship with the bottle is just as messy.

Bruno, sharing a hotel suite with his mother, slopes off to the bathroom for an early morning sharpener:

He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand... In the mirror, the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humour and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast) – a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

And all before breakfast... Small wonder that by the end of the book, Bruno has met a watery end and Guy has been driven insane.

Pulp by Charles Bukowski

When I decided to feature Charles Bukowski in 120 Units, I thought I’d reread Post Office, his booze soaked memoir of working as a postman in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, my copy seems to have been left in the pub, so it was back to the library where I found this, and having covered Raymond Chandler the other week, I couldn’t resist it.


Essentially a pastiche of hard boiled ‘pulp’ fiction, (the private investigator protagonist is even called Nicky Belane), Pulp’s absurd plot involves searching for the French author Celine, an elusive Red Sparrow, extraterrestrials and death itself, in the form of a fabulously beautiful woman. Naturally, there’s a lot of alcohol as well, hence it’s inclusion here.

This is fairly typical:

So there I was, depressed again. I drove back to my place, got in and opened a bottle of scotch. I was back with my old friend, scotch and water. Scotch is a drink you don’t take to right off. But after you work with it a while it kind of works its magic on you. I find a special touch of warmth to it that whiskey doesn’t have. Anyhow, I had the glooms and I sat in a chair with the 5th at my side... There wasn’t much to turn to for me, except the scotch.

That said, Bukowski is capable of bon mot (“Definition of a nice neighbourhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.”) and even a little hard hitting philosophy, especially when it comes to drinking:

Why was the windshield rolling in front of me like a big wave? Must be the hangover. Vodka with beer chaser. You had to pay... Sometimes I thought about my liver but my liver never spoke up, it never said, ‘Stop it, you’re killing me and I’m going to kill you!’ If we had talking livers we wouldn’t need the A.A.

So there you have it. The world would be an easier place if only the liver had learned to speak.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

The wonderful thing about this blog is that I have been lent several books with suggestions for posting; today’s excerpt is from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a man who knew a few things about alcohol.

I cold quote large parts of the book; there are copious references to drinking, all in Chandler’s deadpan prose which is a thrill to read. I’ll kick off with a cocktail recipe. My friend Rich who passed the book on to me, reported that the description of gimlets is so vivid, you can almost taste the lime.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.

The doomed Terry Lennox, who introduces Chandler’s PI, Phillip Marlowe, to gimlets expands on the theme of alcohol:

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

There are obviously only so many gimlets you can drink...