Update: Guns Of Brixton and Cold London Blues

Would you Adam and Eve it, Guns of Brixton and Cold London Blues are brown bread! Well, not quite …

My comic crime capers Guns of Brixton and Cold London Blues were published by Caffeine Nights Publishing in 2014 and 2016 respectively.  And they received a hell of a lot of positive feedback, particularly Guns Of Brixton. However, due to Caffeine Nights decision to reduce their booklist, they have now reverted the rights of the books to me and ceased publication of the titles.

I’m sure both books will be back out and about in some shape or form at a later dater. So watch this space!

In the meantime, the eBook versions of the books are no longer available but there are some paperbacks knocking about.

So if you fancy nabbing one, maybe pop over to Fantastic Fiction:

Guns Of Brixton.

 

Cold London Blues.

Recommended Read: Tainted Love by T S Hunter

Small town boy Joe Hunter heads off to London to stay with his old friend Chris, a rising star in the fashion industry.  When Chris is killed, Joe, along with a former police detective, decides to investigate the murder.  T S Hunter’s Tainted Love is set in Soho in the mid-1980s and has a great sense of time and place. Tainted Love is a whip crack of a read and a great start to T S Hunter‘s acclaimed Soho Noir series.

Recommended Read: Spare Room by Dreda Say Mitchell

Lisa is a young professional woman with a dark past. When she moves into the spare room of a beautiful old house in a posh part of London, she quickly finds out that the house also has its secrets, and that her odd new landlords are not what they seem. Dreda Say Mitchell’s Spare Room is a cracking, fast-paced read that cleverly drags gothic melodrama into the 21st century. This is a breathless, engrossing, urban thriller with a sharp strain of dark humour – Barbara Kendall! – and is a hell of a lot of fun.

Recommended Read: GBH by Ted Lewis

Ted Lewis is probably best known for his 1970 novel Jack’s Return Home and/or its subsequent film versions – Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine, Hit Man starring Bernie Casey (1972), and Get Carter (2000) starring Sylvester Stallone.

GBH was Lewis’ final novel – published in 1980- and it’s pretty damned fantastic. The book’s title is an abbreviation of ‘grievous bodily harm’, a term used in English criminal law to describe a particularly violent form of physical assault. GBH is the story of the decline of London gangster and pornographer George Fowler, and it is cleverly told in two alternating time periods. The earlier period is set in London and is titled The Smoke. The later period is set in an off-season seaside down and is titled The Sea.

GBH has the lot – great characters, sharp dialogue, richly descriptive prose, a cold clammy atmosphere, a powerful sense of time and place, and a cruel, dark humour. It really is a cracking read and is well-deserved of its classic status.

Recommended Read: Slow Horses by Mick Herron

River Cartwright’s short career in the Intelligence Service is almost down the Swanee due to a major screw up on his part. Luckily for him, his grandfather is a bit of a big shot in the Service so he is instead banished to the purgatory of Slough House – home to the Service’s flotsam and jetsam – to work under the bleary and beady eye of the legendary Jackson Lamb.

When a teenager is kidnapped and held hostage, however, things soon go pear shaped and Lamb’s team of misfits and oddball’s is dragged into action, like it or not.

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses is a joy. It’s brilliantly written with rich prose and a sharply drawn cast of characters. The plotting is insidiously clever, the dialogue is smart and funny, and there is a wonderful sense of time and place. Slow Horses ticked all the boxes for me and then some. Bloody marvellous.

Recommended Read: The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth

Published in 2005, Cathi Unsworth’s The Not Knowing was her first novel. It is set in London in the early ’90s and what a great slice of London life it is. Diane Kemp is a journalist working for the trendy Lux magazine. When an uber-hip British film director goes missing she is dragged into the investigation. Meanwhile, a killer stalks the city.

The Not Knowing is a cracking murder mystery with a great sense of time and place and is a hell of a read.

Last Year’s Man Rides Again!

 

For those of you that enjoyed my book LAST YEAR’S MAN, the protagonist Tommy Bennett is back. The Tommy Bennett yarn ‘Baby’s Got A Gun‘ – title filched from The Only Ones – is included in the anthology A TIME FOR VIOLENCE: STORIES WITH AN EDGE.

The anthology is published by CLOSE TO THE BONE and is edited by Andy Rausch and Chris Roy.

It includes stories from Richard Chizmar, Joe R. Lansdale, Max Allen Collins, John A Russo and many more!

You can grab A TIME FOR VIOLENCE from Amazon.com and loads of other joints, in paperback and as an eBook.

 

 

A Song For Saturday: Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews

A Film For Friday: The League Of Gentlemen

Top Telly: Out

In the 1978 TV series OUT, poker-faced Tom Bell plays Frank Ross, a gangster who is sent to prison for robbery after someone grasses him up. Eight years later, Ross leaves the slammer and is confronted with a London that has changed and people that have changed.

Instead of stitching back together his relationships, however, Frank is focused on tracking down whoever stitched him up.  OUT – written by the late Trevor Preston – is great, gritty stuff and it’s a real period piece too- no mobile phones!

There are some great performances, particularly from Bell and Brian Cox as the psychopathic gangster McGrath, but there are loads of top turns from the likes of John Junkin, Victoria Fairbrother, and Peter Blake.

There’s also a very cool credit sequence with a cracking George Fenton theme tune.

And you can watch OUT for nowt on You Tube, if you’re that way inclined.

A Film For Friday: Beat Girl

 

Recommended Read: Dread: The Art Of Serial Killing by Mark Ramsden

Dickens obsessive Mr. Madden is a spy whose mission is to infiltrate the right wing group England Awake!

He is also a serial killer known as The Chavkiller who is out to revenge his dead wife.

Dread: The Art Of Serial Killing by Mark Ramsden is violent, gripping, clever, touching and very, very funny.

The wordplay is witty and the structure is remarkably inventive.

Cultural references abound – high-brow, low-brow -and any book that mentions both Tony Hancock and Frankie Howerd is fine by me.

A belter!

No One Is Innocent at Retreats From Oblivion.

Noir Con‘s online journal –Retreats From Oblivion– have published a slice of my Brit Grit called No One Is Innocent.

‘Marjorie shuffled through the door to the snug and switched on the lights. She pressed a button and the dusty Wurlitzer jukebox burst to life. Jane Morgan belted out ‘The Day The Rains Came.’ In French.‘

Check out the rest here, if you fancy

Recommended Read: The Glass House by Richard Godwin

Troubled rich kids Michael and Abby are kidnapped and their parents are sent bizarre films of them trapped in glass cages.

Michael’s horrified parents contact a private detective, Earl Blake, to help them get their children back but things soon spiral out of control.

Richard Godwin’s The Glass House is a violent and gripping London set crime thriller full of sharp twists and turns.