Shame The Devil by George P. Pelecanos (Dell Books 2000)

The reverend's thin lips turned up in a gaseous grin. "So you like Edwardtown."

"Yes. How about you?"

"Well, I'll tell you. I've lived in New York and some other glamorous places, too. But it was always my dream to come to a small town like Edwardtown to build a congregation from the ground up."

And to fleece the local hayseeds for everything they have.

"I moved around a lot," said the reverend, "searching for I didn't know what until I came here."

Failure.

"And because I never had a wife or children of my - "

Faggot.

" - this congregation has become my family. I'd like very much for you to become a part of that family."

Salesman.

From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell (Ballantine Books 1964)

"About your boyfriends, Mrs. Missal?" As soon as the words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.

"Oh, no," she said sharply. "You've got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat. We used to talk about . . . well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives." She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books, and hear with his mind's ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: "I wanted to act! They wouldn't let me, my father and mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing." She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows. "I met Pete," she said, "and we got married." Her nose wrinkled. "The story of my life."

"You can't have everything," Wexford said.

"No," she said, "I wasn't the only one . . . ."

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (2008)

It had been a few years since Karen had last taken the single-track road to Newton of Wemyss. But it was obvious that the hamlet had undergone the same transformation as its sister villages on the main road. Commuters had fallen ravenous upon all four of the Wemyss villages, seeing rustic possibilities in what had been grim little miners' rows. One-bedroom hovels had been knocked through to make lavish cottages, back yards transformed by conservatories that poured light into gloomy living-kitchens. Villages that had shrivelled and died following the Michael pit disaster in '67 and the closures that followed the 1984 strike had found a new incarnation as dormitories whose entire idea of community was a pub quiz night. In the village shops you could buy a scented candle but not a pint of milk. The only way you could tell there had ever been a mining community was the scale model of pit winding gear that straddled the point where the private steam railway had once crossed the main road laden with open trucks of coal bound for the railhead at Thornton Junction. Now, the whitewashed miners' rows looked like an architect's deliberate choice of what a vernacular village ought to look like. Their history had been overwhelmed by a designer present.

Bloomsbury 100 Must-Read Crime Novels

Ok, let's see how I do with this list from Bloomsbury of the top 100 must-read crime novels that I just found via google.

If it's crossed out, it means I've read it:

Asesinato en el Comitè Central by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Beast in View by Margaret Millar

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Black and Blue by Ian Rankin

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

The Black Echo by Michael Connelly

The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale

The Bridge Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich

The Case of the Terrified Typist by Erle Stanley Gardner

The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh

Come away, death by Gladys Mitchell

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

Dark Passage (Film Ink Series) by David Goodis

Dead Calm by Charles Williams

Dead Cert by Dick Francis

Dead Lagoon by Michael Dibdin

The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter

The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin

Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) by Derek Raymond

Dialogues of the Dead by Reginald Hill

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

Downriver (The Amos Walker Series #9) by Loren D. Estleman

The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (Classic Crime) by Cameron McCabe

Fadeout by Joseph Hansen

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Fast One by Paul Cain

A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell

A Firing Offense by George P. Pelecanos

Flinch by Robert Ferrigno

The Fools in Town Are on Our Side by Ross Thomas

Four Corners of Night by Craig Holden

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker

Gone, No Forwarding by Joe Gores

Hamlet, revenge! by Michael Innes

The Hunter by Richard Stark

The Ice House by Minette Walters

In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson

Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

A Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane

LaBrava by Elmore Leonard

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

Laura by Vera Caspary

The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout

Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon

Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K. C. Constantine

The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Miami Blues by Charles Willeford

The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart M. Kaminsky

The mystery of a hansom cab by Fergus Hume

The Mystery Of The Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Off With His Head by Ngaio Marsh

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

Roman Blood by Steven Saylor

Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

A Taste for Death by P. D. James

Tell No One by Harlan Coben

A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman

The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr

A Three-Pipe Problem by Julian Symons

The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley

Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone

Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall

Under the Bright Lights by Daniel Woodrell

An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block

When the Wind Blows by Cyril Hare

Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? by G. M. Ford

Of the one hundred books listed I've only read eight of them! That is woeful.

I didn't look at the list prior to scrolling down it and scoring through those books that I've read. I thought there would be at least twenty books on the list that I've read. Blogging life was so much simpler with 365Watch.

A wee tap on the shoulder . . .

. . . . and a whisper in the ear of, 'You've not read enough'.

That's the shiver I get when I stumble across book polls like the recent one conducted by NPR.

Seventeen thousand readers/listeners/viewers - what exactly do people do with NPR? - voted on their favourite 'Killer Thrillers' and, of the Top 100 listed, it turns out I've read a grand total of 2 of them.

Every other book I read is crime fiction, and it turns out I've been reading the wrong ones. Granted I've probably seen the film versions of about 20 of the books listed but that won't win me any kudos amongst the Ditmas Park literati.

There's only one solution. No, not actually knuckle down and read some of the works listed . . . find another crime fiction top 100 poll more in tune with my reading tastes. It'll be out there somewhere. Even if I have to create a bogus one myself.

Strip Jack by Ian Rankin (Minotaur Books 1992)

'Are you an Inspector of Hospitals?' he asked.

'No, sir, I'm a police inspector.'

'Oh.' His face dulled a little. 'I thought maybe you'd come to . . . they don't treat us well here, you know.' He paused. 'There, because I've told you that I'll probably be disciplined, maybe even put into solitary. Everything, any dissension, gets reported back. But I've got to keep telling people, or nothing will be done. I have some influential friends, Inspector.' Rebus thought this was for the nurse's ears more than his own. 'Friends in high places . . .'

Well, Dr Forster knew that now, thanks to Rebus.

' . . . friends I can trust. People need to be told, you see. They censor our mail. They decide what we can read. They won't even let me read Das Kapital. And they give us drugs. The mentally ill, you know, by whom I mean those who have been judged to be mentally ill, we have less rights than the most hardened mass murderer . . . hardened but sane mass murderer. Is that fair? Is that . . . humane?'

Boiling A Frog by Christopher Brookmyre (Abacus 2000)

Given her pedigree, she was also a Tory target for accusations of selling out in endorsing Tony Blair's reforms. She had become yet another New Labour robot, they said, and had betrayed everything her father stood for simply to further her own career. Yeah, sure, and the band played "Believe it if You Like'. Labour politicians had always been accused of abandoning their principles in pursuit of power, since long before Tony Blair appeared on the scene. It was part of the Tories' time served pincer-movement strategy: if you took a hard line you were a dangerous lefty out to wreck the economy; if you softened your position, you were an unprincipled chancer who'd do anything for a sniff of power. The Tories knew they'd never face the same charge because they didn't have any principles in the first place. How do you ideologically compromise a stance built on greed, materialism and xenophobia?

Consequently, she didn't mourn Clause Four's passing. Holding on to it was a futile gesture of stubborn and misguided faith, like wearing the medal of some mediaeval saint whose canonisation had been rescinded. It was an anachronism and an impossible dream, but far more damaging, it was also a stick with which their enemies had too often beaten them.

Compromise was always depicted as a political sin by those in the grandstand. Those in the game knew that politics is compromise. If you want a party that believes in all the things you do, and with which you disagree on nothing, you'll have to start it yourself, and the membership is extremely unlikely ever to exceed single figures. In binary.

A Firing Offense by George P. Pelecanos (Serpent's Tail 1992)

I first met Karen in a bar in Southeast, a new wave club near the Eastern Market run by an Arab named Haddad whom everyone called HaDaddy-O.

This was late in '79 or early in 1980, the watershed years that saw the debut release of the Pretenders, Graham Parker's Squeezing Out Sparks, and Elvis Costello's Get Happy, three of the finest albums ever produced. That I get nostalgic now when I hear "You Can't Be Too Strong" or "New Amsterdam" or when I smell cigarette smoke in a bar or feel sweat drip down my back in a hot club, may seem incredible today - especially to those who get misty-eyed over Sinatra, or even at the first few chords of "Satisfaction" - but I'm talking about my generation.

The Big Blowdown by George P. Pelecanos (St Martin's Press 1996)

"How much do you want us to collect?" said Recevo

"Forty ought to do it for now. We had a little communication problem in the past. Maybe he was kidding me, but I couldn't understand much of what the old guy said. Typical, with these immigrants - they don't even bother to learn the language."

That's because they've been too busy workin', tryin' to feed their families. Workin' like dogs, as if a dog could ever work that hard. Not that any of you snow-white bastards would understand the meaning of the word-

" . . . That's why I thought it might be a good idea for Karras here to go along. That sound good to you, Karras?"

Karras smiled and nodded. He thought he'd mix things up this time.

"Yeah," said Reed. "Karras and this Georgakos bird, they speak the same language. The two of them can sit around together all night and grunt."

Gearhart snorted, issued a gassy grin. Karra heard Reed strike a match to the Fatima behind his back. The smoke from it crawled across the room.

"Forty dollars," said Recevo, trying to cut the chill. "That should be a walk in the park, right, Pete?"

"Not a problem," said Karras.

"Hey, Karras," said Reed. "Be a good little coloured girl and fetch me that ashtray offa Mr. Burke's desk."

"I'll get it," said Recevo, but Karras held him back with his arm.

"I asked Karras to get it for me," said Reed.

Karras pointed his chin in the direction of Gearhart. "Ask Laird Cregar over there to get it for you, Reed. He's a little closer."

Gearhart's grin turned down. He didn't make a move for the ashtray, and neither did Reed.

Recevo drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. He shifted in his seat. "Mr. Burke, what should we do if this Georgakos gives us an argument?"

"He won't give you an argument," said Burke, keeping his eyes locked on Karras. "He wouldn't give an argument to a couple of boys who've seen the action you've seen. Would he?"

Burke himself had seen no "action", as he was on the brown side of thirty. But he had a brother who had fought in the European theatre, and being a veteran meant something to Burke. There were points to be had there, Karras figured, and some degree of slack.

"We'll take care of it", said Recevo, and he and Karras rose from their seats.

"Hey," said Reed. "I've got an idea. Maybe you ought to wear your uniforms over to the Greek's place. Wear your medals, too. Maybe that would help.

"Maybe you'd like to go with them," said Burke, with a touch of acid in his voice.

"Reed might have a little problem there," said Karras. He'd need a uniform, too. And the last time I checked, they weren't handin' out uniforms to Section Eights."

Reed stood from his chair, blood coloring his face.

"Hold it," said Burke. "You two can play if you want, but not in here."

"Guy kills a few Japs," muttered Reed, "thinks his asshole squirts perfume."

Burke raised his voice. "Shut your mouth, Reed, and sit down. You can thank me later."

Two Way Split by Allan Guthrie (Polygon Press 2004)

Banging. Robin glanced at Eddie. More banging. Regular. Insistent. Someone pounding on the front door. Their visitor, the concerned citizen. Robin couldn't tell how Eddie was reacting behind the balaclava. More banging. It stopped and a muffled voice said, 'I'm coming in.' Silence. A shout accompanied by a screech as the wedge under the door was driven back a couple of inches. Robin set down the bag as a hand reached round the gap at the side of the door and sent the wedge tumbling across the floor. As the door swung open, Hilda dashed forward. He caught her by the wrist and dragged her in an arc straight into his arms. She wriggled until he rested the blade of the knife against her lips. She was panting heavily and her hairspray ticked the back of his throat.

'Let her go.' The man who spoke was inappropriately dressed for the cold weather in a white t-shirt and black jeans. He stood in the doorway, chill air gusting in from behind him.

'Who the fuck are you?' Eddie said.

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre (Abacus 1996)

'My grandfather always maintained that where there was muck, there was brass,' Parlabane said. 'If you're not afraid to get your hands dirty and put your back into your work, you'll get a fair reward. However, throughout the tenure of our present government, I discovered a valuable reciprocal to be true: where there's lots of brass, there's usually muck, and I've made a career out of looking for it.

As Michael Portillo fearlessly said, in this country, as opposed to those wog-ridden foreign sties - I'm paraphrasing here, although only slightly - if you win a contract, it's not because your brother is a government minister or you blatantly bribed an official. Of course not. That would be corruption. In this country, you win contracts because you are "one of us", you went to the right school, give money to the right party, and have awarded an executive post to a member of the cabinet's family, or have promised a seat on the board to the appropriate minister when he resigns to spend more time with his bankers.

'We don't have anything as vulgar or primitive as a bribe. It's a matter of trust. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. For every contract, there's a kickback. It's more noble, more gentlemanly. A matter of mutual understanding. And very, very British.'

Sarah stared across, unimpressed. 'Once again, hot-shot, this much I know. Not an exclusive. Cut to the chase.'

'Fair enough. I got a bit of a reputation for myself through in Glasgow, sniffing out scams, investigating dodgy deals. But what I really wanted was to go after the big game down south, and I was head-hunted by one of the big broadsheet Sundays. I thought it would either make my career or turn out to be the worst move south by a promising young Scot since Charlie Nicholas. In the end it was both.

Sacred by Dennis Lehane (Avon Books 1997)

Four years ago, after a particularly lucrative case involving insurance fraud and white-collar extortion, I went to Europe for two weeks. And what struck me most at the time was how many of the small villages I visited - in Ireland and Italy and Spain - resembled Boston's North End.

The North End was where each successive wave of immigrants had left the boat and dropped their bags. So the Jewish and then the Irish and finally the Italians had called this area home and given it the distinctly European character it retains today. The streets are cobblestone, narrow, and curve hard around and over and through each other in a neighborhood so small in physical area that in some cities it would barely constitute a block. But packed in here tight were legions of red and yellow brick rowhouses, former tenements co-opted and restored, and the odd cast-iron or granite warehouse, all fighting for space and getting really weird on top where extra stories were added after "up" became the only option. So clapboard and brick rise up from what were once mansard roofs, and laundry still stretches between opposite fire escapes and wrought-iron patios, and "yard" is an even more alien concept than "parking space."

Lush Life by Richard Price (Picador 2008)

He had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theater production of The Dybbuck sponsored by 88 Forsyth House ywo years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now-defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting run face-first into a wall.

The Distant Echo by Val McDermid (St Martin's Minotaur 2003)

And they were off. Like wizards casting combative spells at each other, Sigmund and Davey threw song titles, lyrics and guitar riffs back and forth in the ritual dance of an argument they'd been having for the past six or seven years. It didn't matter that, these days, the music rattling the windows of their student rooms was more likely to come from the Clash, the Jam or the Skids. Even their nicknames spoke of their early passions. From the very first afternoon they'd congregated in Alex's bedroom after school to listen to his purchase of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it had been inevitable that the charismatic Sigmund would be Ziggy, the leper messiah, for eternity. And the others would have to settle for being the Spiders. Alex became Gilly, in spite of his protestations that it was a jessie nickname for someone who aspired to the burly build of a rugby player. But there was no arguing with the accident of his surname. And none of them had a moment's doubt about the appropriateness of christening the fourth member of their quartet Weird. Because Tom Mackie was weird, make no mistake about it. The tallest in their year, his long gangling limbs even looked like a mutation, matching a personality that delighted in being perverse.

That left Davey, loyal to the cause of the Floyd, steadfastly refusing to accept any nickname from the Bowie canon. For a while, he'd been known halfheatedly as Pink, but from the first time they'd all heard "Shine on, You Crazy Diamond" there had been no further debate: Davey was a crazy diamond, right enough, flashing fire in unpredictable directions, edgy and uncomfortable out of the right setting. Diamond soon became Mondo, and Mondo Davey Kerr had remained through the remaining year of high school and on to university.

A Drink Before The War by Dennis Lehane (Harper Torch 1994)

As I grew, so did the fires, it seemed, until recently L.A. burned, and the child in me wondered what would happen to the fallout, if the ashes and smoke would drift northeast, settle here in Boston, contaminate the air.

Last summer, it seemed to. Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things - racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness - but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.

People died last summer. Most of them innocent. Some more guilty than others.

Right As Rain by George P. Pelecanos (Warner Books 2001)

You're not the first person who's thought of those things. So why isn't anyone talking about it for real?"

"Cause you put all those politicians down on the Hill in one room and you can't find one set of nuts swingin' between the legs of any of 'em. Even the ones who know what's got to be done, they realize that comin' out in favor of drug legalization and handgun illegalization will kill their careers. And the rest of them are in the pockets of the gun lobby. Meantime, nearly half the black men in this city have either been incarcerated or are in jail now."

"You tellin' me it's a black thing?"

"I'm tellin' you it's a money thing. We got two separate societies in this country, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is gettin' wider every day. And the really frustrating thing is -"

"No one cares,' said Quinn.

"Not exactly. You got mentors, community activists, church groups out there, they're tryin', man, believe me. But it's not enough. More to the point, some people care, but most people care about the wrong things.

"Look, why does a dumb-ass, racist disc jockey make the front page and the leadoff on the TV news for weeks, when the murder of teenage black children gets buried in the back of the Metro section every day? Why do my own people write columns year after year in the Washington Post, complainin' that black actors don't get nominated for any Academy Awards, when they should be writin' every goddamn day about the fucked-up schools in this city, got no supplies, leaking roofs, and fifteen-year-old textbooks. You got kids walkin' to school in this city afraid for their lives, and once they get there they got one security guard lookin' after five hundred children. How many bodyguards you think the mayor's got, huh?"

"I don't know, Derek. You askin' me?"

"I'm makin' a point."

"You gotta relax," said Quinn. "Guy your age, you could stroke out . . ."

"Aw, fuck you, man."

Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin (St Martin's Paperbacks 1990)

Hyde's Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson's villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city's Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation in this large room. Stale cigars and spilt whisky, splashes of sweat. And amongst it all moved Ronnie, and the question which still needed to be answered. Had Ronnie been paid to photograph the influential and the rich - without their knowing they were being snapped, of course? Or had he been freelancing, summoned here only as a punchbag, but stealthy enough to bring a hidden camera with him? The answer was perhaps unimportant. What mattered was that the owner of this place, the puppet-master of all these base desires, had killed Ronnie, had starved him of his fix and then given him some rat poison. Had sent one of his minions along to the squat to make sure it looked like a simple case of an overdose. So they had left the quality powder beside Ronnie. And to muddy the water, they had moved the body downstairs, leaving it in candlelight. Thinking the tableau shockingly effective. But by candlelight they hadn't seen the pentagram on the wall, and they hadn't meant anything by placing the body the way they had.

Rebus had made the mistake of reading too much into the situation, all along. He had blurred the picture himself, seeing connections where there were none, seeing plot and conspiracy where none existed. The real plot was so much bigger, the size of a haystack to his needle.

Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin (St Martin's Paperbacks 1996)

"Mr. Haldayne has a point, Inspector." Mathieson was sitting down again, in his big Chief Executive chair at the end of the table. Tables without corners were supposed to make everyone equal, but Mathieson's chair was a leather throne. He looked and sounded completely unruffled by events thus far, while Rebus felt his head would explode.

Hundreds of jobs . . . spin-offs . . . happy, smiling faces. People like Salty Dougary, pride restored, given another chance. Did Rebus have the gall to think he could pronounce sentence on the future of people like that? People who wouldn't care who got away with what, so long as they had a paycheck at the end of the month?

Gillespie had died, but Rebus knew these men hadn't killed him, not directly. At the same time he hated them, hated their confidence and their indifference, hated their certainty that what they did was "for the good." They knew the way the world worked; they knew who - or, rather, what - was in charge. It wasn't anyone stupid enough to place themselves in the front line. It was secret quiet men who got on with their work the world over, bribing where necessary, breaking the rules, but quietly, in the name of progress, in the name of the system.

Shug McAnally was dead, but no one was grieving: Tresa was spending his money, and having a good time with Maisie Finch. Audrey Gillespie, too, might start enjoying life for the first time in years, maybe with her lover. A man had died - cruelly and in terror - but he was all there was on Rebus's side of the balance sheet. And on the other . . . everything else.

Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce (Bloomsbury 2001)

'So Bronzini and Llewellyn would have had plenty of enemies, and Brainbocs wouldn't say boo to a goose?'

'Just about. Although even Brainbocs had a few enemies.'

'Really?'

'Brainbocs got a Saturday job working at the rock factory - helping out in the R & D unit after hours. He became interested in the great age-old puzzle of rock manufacturing, called D Quincey's Theorem. It's very complicated, but basically it concerns the attempt to change the wording of the letters midway through the rock. You know, it starts off saying Blackpool and then after a few mouthfuls it says Zanzibar or something. It's one of the last great challenges of the rock-marker's art. And he cracked it. Just like that. Sat down with a pen and paper and a set of log tables and worked it out. So then the management make him head of R & D and within a week - and the kid is still in school, don't forget, hasn't even done his O levels - within a week he'd found a way of computer type-setting the letters. Saved a fortune: twenty old-timers were thrown out of work the same afternoon. Entire factory closes down on strike. The Unions say, "Get rid of the kid, or you'll never make another stick of rock in this town" So they fire the kid. His parting shot was forty cases of rock that said "Aberystwyth" and then after two mouthfuls read: "I've pissed in this rock".'

Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane (1996)

He stared at me for a long time. Eventually, I sat down on the top step, opened my three bills, and leafed through my latest issue of Spin, read some of an article on Machinery Hall.

"You listen to Machinery Hall, Kev?" I said eventually.

Kevin stared and breathed through his nostrils.

"Good band," I said. "You should pick up their CD."

Kevin didn't look like he'd be dropping by Tower Records after our chat.

"Sure, they're a little derivative, but who isn't these days?"

Kevin didn't look like he knew what derivative meant.

For ten minutes, he stood there without saying a word, his eyes never leaving me, and they were dull murky eyes, as lively as swamp water. I guessed this was the morning Kevin. The night Kevin was the one with the charged-up eyes, the ones that seemed to pulse with homicide. The morning Kevin looked catatonic.

"So, Kev, I'm guessing here, but I'd say you're not a big alternative music fan."

Kevin lit a cigarette.

"I didn't used to be, but then my partner pretty much convinced me that there was more out there than the Stones and Springsteen. A lot of it is corporate bullshit, and a lot is overrated, don't get me wrong. I mean, explain Morrissey. But then you get a Kurt Cobain or a Trent Reznor, and you say, 'These guys are the real deal,' and it's all enough to give you hope. Or maybe I'm wrong. By the way, Kev, how did you feel about Kurt's death? Did you think we lost the voice of our generation or did that happen when Frankie Goes to Hollywood broke up?"