Drop Your Socks ...

That's right. You heard.

At some point in the near future (update: February 2012, Wolf Tickets will be available as an e-book from Blasted Heath. I'm not going to tell you when. You need to keep an eye on their website. Believe me, it'll be worth it.

(Update: Guthrie announced it while I wasn't looking, the bastard - 13th February 2012, folks!)

Cover, as always, by that hardboiled "Genius in a G-string", JT Lindroos.

California - Best Novella of 2012?

Magic 8-ball, he say otherwise.

California, a novella written by Your Humble Narrator, makes the list of nominations for Spinetingler's Best Of 2012, which is pretty exciting news, tempered somewhat by the fact that it's up against this shower of talented bastards:

Barracuda - Raymond Embrack
Everything I Tell You is a Lie - Fingers Murphy
Every Shallow Cut - Tom Piccirilli
Felony Fists - Jack Tunney
Follow Me Down - Kio Stark
Old Ghosts - Nik Korpon
The Point - Gerard Brennan
Shotgun Gravy - Chuck Wendig
Smoke - Nigel Bird

So, yeah, pretty much a snowball's chance in hell. If you're stuck for who to vote for (and you should be, given that line-up), my own recommendation is Piccirilli's Every Shallow Cut, which is one of the best pieces on failure, revenge and the bitter truth of the writing business I've read in a long time. The rest can be bought at links on the site below and are well worth the money.

Vote here.

"It's the world's smallest violin, playing just for the waitresses ..."

There's a storm brewing over on the Blasted Heath. They've had this idea for short story collections, you see, and they've got all their covers designed in a Penguin-stylee, but it appears that nobody wants the pink cover.

I know, right? Like pink isn't hardboiled enough for them, the fucking poseurs. When pink is the colour of an open wound, a good steak, pigs (handy for disposing of a corpse), baby rats, a diamond stolen by David Niven, Hubba Bubba and an albino assassin's eyes. So I say reclaim pink for the toughest of the Blasted Heath authors. I say make pink the vanguard colour for the new hardboiled.

I say, VOTE BANKS FOR THE PINK!

Crime Factory Issue 9

As previously mentioned, Your Humble Narrator just did some stuff for those hardbitten sons of bitches over at Crime Factory. I'm sharing Issue 9 with some fucking names, man. See the line-up and go cross-eyed with lust!

CF9 features exclusive content from Tom Piccirilli (The Shadow Season, The Cold Spot)*, Scott Phillips (The Ice Harvest, Cottonwood), Johnny Shaw (Dove Season), Daniel B. O'Shea (Old School), Benjamin Whitmer (Pike, Satan is Real), Paul D. Brazill (Drunk on the Moon, Brit Grit), exclusive fiction from Kenneth Loosli, Chris Benton and Chris Deal, as well as features by Matthew C. Funk, Peter "Nerd of Noir" Dragovich, Andrew Nette and Noel King.

My own offering is a short story called "The Travel Agent". I was kind of proud of it when I sent it off, so I'm not going to read it again, just in case it disappoints.

Anyway, go read Crime Factory 9 over here.

Also, yes, I'm blogging on a monthly basis for 'em, and my first post "The French Word for Bleak" is - natch - about noir and ready for you to read and disagree with, should you so wish. I have no doubt that the other regular bloggers will mop the floor with me in due course, but for the moment I'll enjoy being the only one up there.

* I just picked up Pic's Fuckin' Lie Down Already which is a growler of a noirella. But then you probably already know that, and have read everything he's written, yes? YES?

That Was The Year That Was ... And What Will Be

Okay, let's get the obligatory end-of-year thing out of the way ...

Well, so, 2011, eh? Phew. That was a weird one for me. Lots of changes, both personal and professional.

Myself and The Missus moved back up to Edinburgh after seven years. Plenty of things prompted that, not least that my old workplace turned into a wasteland in the wake of a Tory victory, with redundancies, restructuring and recriminations in abundance and we figured that if we were going to be financially shaky, we might as well do it in a city we both love. We got very lucky in our flat-hunting (thanks to Mrs. B and the much-resisted purchase of a mobile phone*), and in my old boss (now no longer with the company), who let me work from home for a month. Thank you once again, Peter G.

Beast of Burden, the last Innes novel, came out in hardback in the US and sent the series out in style, thanks to some lovely work by HMH. It also garnered some nice reviews in print (It was in Entertainment Weekly, for fuck's sake! What are the odds?) and online**, and some really nice ones on Amazon. California also hit the shelves as part of the revamped Crime Express series from Five Leaves, and rubbed shoulders with that filthy delinquent Charlie Willams, whose Graven Image is FREE on Amazon until 3rd January.

I also dipped my toe into the waters of self-publishing, and put out both of my Crime Express novellas, Gun and California, which really wasn't as painful an experience as I'd expected it to be. Sales of both have also been waaaaay better than expected, as has their reception and review coverage. I don't know much I'm likely to self-pub in the future, though - both those novellas were properly edited, and I'm not the kind of bloke who likes to go running around with his flies down, despite what you may have heard.

Lucky for me then that I signed up with Blasted Heath. Yeah, you all know about them. They're pretty fucking amazing, but I have to say, they're really naive in certain respects - they signed up a rewrite for one, and then presented me with contracts for a further five novels. That rewrite was Dead Money, and I'd be lying I didn't say that I was actively dreading its pub date, thinking that people would dismiss it as old rope. But I've been reliably informed that it's doing nicely, thanks for asking, and we'll see how it continues next year. As for Blasted Heath as publishers, they're quick, efficient, use plain English in their contracts and genuinely care about both the quality and success of their books. Which already puts them way above most traditional publishers. We'll see if they pay on time ...

In other writing news, I finished a first draft of the follow-up to Dead Money and (as much as these things can ever be finished) a screenplay adaptation of Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, started this blog up again as well as another one over at Norma Desmond's Monkey, and a few short stories and non-fiction bits and bobs here and there, most notably perhaps in Luca Veste's fantastic charity anthology Off The Record. I also managed to finish off the three-parter Wolf Tickets for those sick bastards at Needle.

So, moderately busy, then.

When I put it all like that, it looks like more than it actually was. Bottom line, mind, is that I didn't really write that much new stuff in 2011. It was a transition year, from Newcastle to Edinburgh, from print to electronic (which is where a majority of my new stuff will come out first), and tying up a series of loose ends that had been bugging me.

2012 is where the real work begins. Lots to be done. There are five novels to be republished (Wolf Tickets and the Innes books) which will require a little tweaking here and there, most likely, but no major rewrites (I hope), and I did want to get at least two other novels finished this year, as well as the shorts I have promised to a variety of venues and perhaps a little more screenwriting work if I can get it. This will no doubt choke me until my birthday on the Diamond Jubilee (35, which I believe means I outlive Charlie Parker - yay, me). Oh, and I'll be blogging on a monthly basis for Crime Factory, as well as trying to keep up appearances over here and at NDM.

Can you spell over-committed? Well, you know, I like to keep busy.

In the meantime, though, I have red wine and a cheeky 12-year-old*** to get down me. So stay safe, you bunch of animals, and try not to get in too much trouble tonight. And remember, if there's ash in your glass, you probably shouldn't drink from it.

* Neither of us particularly wanted what Stephen King once called "the shackles of the 21st Century", but when you're looking for a flat in Edinburgh, you kind of need one. I compromised by buying one of those three quid pre-pay phones drug dealers use.
** Apparently, there was a review in Booklist at some point too. I haven't read it, so I can only assume it was a big, fat pan.
*** Bruichladdich, you dirty-minded bastards.

Aaand I'm out ...

See you in 2012, folks.

This Is England '88

If there's one word that sums up the British Christmas, at least when it comes to television, it's "grim". This is a nation for whom one of the biggest (if not the biggest) and best remembered Christmas moments came when a philandering low-life landlord slapped divorce papers into his alcoholic, inveterate bullshitter wife's hands and said, "'Appy Christmas, Ange"*. Even its most popular sitcoms have the bitter taste of despair about them - Only Fools and Horses, The Royle Family, The Office, Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part - and so it's only right to warn you up front that This Is England '88 is about as far from glitzy yuletide tomfoolery as it's possible to get. This is 1988, after all. Thatcher has dug in deep at Number Ten, becoming Britain's longest-serving prime minister, Harry Enfield's caricature of the money-grubbing working class nouveau riche is popular for all the wrong reasons, and PM-shagging troll Edwina Currie gives the British egg industry a kick in the balls when she erroneously claims that most of those six-packs are riddled with salmonella.**

And yet, compared to This Is England '86, Shane Meadows' follow-up (and second spin-off from his fantastic movie This Is England) is downright life-affirming. Of course, it's easy to remember '86 as unremittingly grim. Lol's dad (chillingly played by Johnny Harris) was the cause of all that, and the rape and murder that followed was an inevitable, if utterly gruelling watch. At the end of that series, Lol (Vicky McClure) and Woody (Joseph Gilgun) were no longer together, thanks to her fucking his best mate Milky (Andrew Shim), and former racist Combo (Stephen Graham) was back in prison. There were pieces to be picked up, but nobody seemed in much of a state to do anything about it.

Fast forward two and a half years, and time hasn't so much healed wounds as let them scar. Lol is now a single mother, irascible, apparently struck with post-natal depression and unwilling to have much to do with Milky (who happens to be the father of her daughter). Woody has ostensibly settled down with another girl and offered a promotion at the factory, neither of which he's particularly happy about. And Combo, well, he's still very much in the nick. And if this is all beginning to sound a bit like an Eastenders Christmas special, you'd be partly right, if Eastenders featured recognisable human characters, a realistic setting, astounding scripts (by Meadows and Jack Thorne) and assured direction. Indeed, the parallel is drawn nicely by Lol's blank-eyed watching of the show.

Because This Is England '88 isn't really a television drama in the usual sense. It's ironic that out of his filmography to date, the two TIE television series represent Shane Meadows' most cinematic work. And while '86 might be too much for a single sitting, '88 manages to come across less like a miniseries and more as a single, coherent film, not least because of Channel 4's decision to show it across three consecutive nights (the series also takes place over the three-day run up to Christmas). His cast, too, turn in what are essentially film performances. Vicky McClure rightly won the BAFTA for her work in '86 and she deserves the same again for her work in '88, turning in the kind of faultless performance that may not have obvious drama of the previous year, but is no less compelling because of it. Joseph Gilgun too - shamefully overlooked along with Stephen Graham for his work on the original film - deserves a huge amount of attention, not least because in Woody, Gilgun has created (and what sounds like partially ad-libbed) a character of immense charm, and manages the story's (sometimes quite wild, yet truthful) tonal shifts without breaking a sweat. After all, this is a character struggling to remain affable in the face of what he sees are oppressive life choices - his promotion at the factory and steady, nice-but-boring girlfriend represent his gradual change from carefree skinhead to dad. And while this is something that someone like his boss, with his 2-for-1 pub meal vouchers and Ford Scorpio, might see as a step in the right direction, for Woody it's the final stitch in his double-knit straitjacket.

If there's any recurring theme with the This Is England series, right from the film onwards, it's that of growing older and facing your responsibilities. Stripped of the kind of sentimentality that sometimes bogged down Meadows' early work, This Is England '88 and the preceding series instead show us characters that aren't always likeable, don't always make reasonable decisions, don't always react with grace under pressure or in a sympathetic way, but who are eminently human, and who appear to be slowly learning how to struggle through life. In that respect, Meadows and Thorne come across more like an apolitical Loach and Laverty, and as such have delivered a welcome change from the high-concept procedural slurry currently bloating the listings. Weirdly enough, the This Is England series also represent a more thorough look at Britain and the British identity than any "current" drama.

I never thought I'd ever say this, but roll on 1990.


* Watching that clip again, I'm reminded of how many of those characters were either abused or about to be. In the opening minute you have a "pretty and fair" rapist, the family whose father figure embezzled the Christmas club money and then went mental and whose big bruv loves his smack, the old Christian lady whose son is EVIL talking to a woman who'll eventually go nuts after her son's cot death, then there's the punk single mother who'll be forced into prostitution by the big blonde woman you saw at the start. God bless us, everyone!

* This is also the woman who said: "Good Christian people who would not dream of misbehaving will not catch AIDS." She also has a sideline in writing smut. The people we elect, eh? I say "we", of course ...