Down for the Count by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1985)

I tried to ignore the shadow over me, but you can’t do that when it belongs to the heavyweight champion of the world.

“He dead?” Joe Louis said, breathing heavily. Louis was wearing blue shorts and an extra-extra large white T-shirt stained with sweat. His feet were bare.

“Down for the count,” I said.

About a quarter-mile down the shore some girls were giggling in the surf, the late sun hitting their tanned bodies, their voices bubbling through the white waves hitting the beach and the corpse I was kneeling next to. I looked away from the girls and out over the ocean at the sun heading for Japan. I wondered how I was going to tell Anne about the massive brown figure in the wet sand casting his shadow over me and the badly beaten body. There wasn’t much face left on the body, but there wasn’t any doubt about who it was.

Ralph Howard had always dressed tastefully, conservatively. Even now with sand, salt water, and pinkish blood staining the tan panama suit, the corpse had Ralph’s touch.

The Beiderbecke Affair by Alan Plater (Mandarin 1985)

The Adult Education Institute was built in the nineteenth century by a paternalistic mill-owner with the stated aim of bringing a spiritual uplift to the artisans of the area. A hundred years later, it still had not succeeded. The building, designed in the Gothic Inspirational manner, was now a hive of small rooms in which groups of predominately earnest people discussed D. H. Lawrence, watched The Battleship Potemkin or threw pots. It was not unusual for six people to be plotting revolution in Room 5, while across the corridor in Room 6, another six people were plotting counter-revolution. All twelve would meet in The Bells afterwards for a pint.

The Big Man by William McIlvanney (Canongate Books 1985)

Dan felt a liberating affection for his father. Poor, old, hard, honest bastard. Having lashed himself to his principles to survive, he couldn’t be blamed for not being able to move, though the times did. Dan’s love of his mother, never compromised, came back to him. He wished he could speak to them now to reassure them that he wasn’t lost entirely to the past they had believed in, that he hadn’t quite forsaken what they stood for, that he, too, had his pride. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate speech – they never were in his parents’ house. It would have been something gruffly cryptic, in a code they would have understood, something like: ‘Don’t panic, Feyther. Mither, Ah’m still me.’

But he had to admit to himself that his pride, if it was still there, was in a funny place. His parents’ pride had been like a medal they could wear, one they had earned. His own was something he felt was still with him but he couldn’t have pointed to it. The explicitness of their experience had bestowed on them a kind of brute heroism. His experience had been different, still was. If their lives had been as clear-cut as trench-warfare, his was as confusing as espionage, a labyrinth of double-agents.

What did you trust these days? You couldn’t vaguely trust the historical future in which his parents had believed. Part of it was already here and it was unrecognisable as what had been foretold. Better material conditions hadn’t created solidarity but fragmentation. Working-class parvenus were at least as selfish as any other kind. You couldn’t simply vote Labour and trust that Socialism would triumph. The innocence of his parents’ early belief in the purity of Socialism couldn’t be transplanted to the time that followed Socialism’s exercising of power, however spasmodic. In power, Socialism had found it hard to recognise itself, had become neurotic with expediency, had forgotten that it had never merely been a policy but a policy growing from a faith founded in experience. Lose the faith that had been justly earned from the lives of generations of people and Socialism was merely words and words were infinitely flexible. You couldn’t trust the modern generation of those who had formerly been the source at which Socialism had reaffirmed its faith. All around they were reaching private settlements with their society’s materialism in terms that contained no clauses to safeguard others of their own who might be less fortunate.

If you were honest, you couldn’t even trust yourself. He had often enough expressed his contempt for people he had known who, coming from his own background, had succeeded academically or in business and had turned their backs on where they came from. He had heard them at parties and in pubs preaching the worthlessness of their own heritage and he had despised them. But he also knew that you couldn’t trust yourself not to be like them until you had been to a place where the temptations were real, where you too had the opportunity to make a purely private enterprise of your life and the rewards were sufficient to put such principles as you had to the test. He had never been to such a place.

Days Like These by Nigel Fountain (Ink Monkey Books 1985)

Ferret wasn't on the phone. His real name is Jack Murray, but he is always known as Ferret; a friend of the old mole, the revolution, he said. I reckoned it was because of his pointed nose and scuttling manner. He is thirty-four, small and dark. He had left Glasgow six years ago to continue a disastrous liaison with a woman who had come down to seek her fortune, and, I suspect, to escape from Ferret. It took her two years to lose Ferret and three to find the pot of gold in every TV researcher's knapsack.

I'd met him at a party and we had got on. He took to me, I suspected, because he liked to have someone to flagellate politically. He was a walking anthology of the left, having tried Labour, the Communists, the Nats for two days, the Socialist Workers, a short-lived Maoist group, the International Marxists, and had finally settled down with a cosy little group of Trotskyists who were apparently based in Stockport and were attempting to Bolshevise that town. This had the double advantage of allowing him to spin romantic stories of the proletarian upsurge there, whilst ensuring that he and the mass base of the organisation were kept at a safe distance from each other. The group were called Workers for Revolutionary Change, or 'those creeps the Wircs'. It was an unwieldy title, but this was common in such groups and represented a satisfactory permutation of the key syntax of red vocabulary. Ferret was effectively the London branch.

He lived in Stoke Newington. It took me an hour to get there.

He blinked at me from behind his door.

'Christ, haven't you had enough?'

His room was in a house of reds of varying shades, who met to abuse one another on the stairway on their way to work, the duplicator and the pub. Ferret had made a marriage of convenience with that section of the radical lower middle classes questing timidly for the proletariat. Occasionally he would go and ham up his days in the Gorbals, particularly when drunk, but otherwise would happily sneak off to the National Film Theatre. He was a sharp man, and a good organiser when he could be bothered.

I followed him upstairs, past a Paris May 1968 'REFORMES CHLOROFORME' poster. It was held in place by a flightless dart.

He paused on the landing to cough. I was vaguely nauseated to see that he was swallowing the phlegm, but that was preferable to spraying me with it, I supposed.

Head Case by Liza Cody (Bantam Books 1985)

"Were you supposed to teach her to paint - as well as the history stuff?"

"That was the general idea." Lynne frowned, remembering. "It was quite ridiculous. The poor girl simply froze the minute I put a pencil in her hand. She didn't do a thing, so finally I showed her slides instead. A waste of time, as in the end we both agreed."

"Why did she freeze?"

"She didn't say. But after watching her a while I thought it was because she didn't know how to get it right."

"But, surely," Anna said curiously, "that's what you were there to show her."

"Ah, well . . . " Lynne smiled. "Perhaps that's where she knows more about it than you or I do. You see, I can show her something: how to look, or how to use a line, or how to catch reflected light, but I can't show her how to get it right. There's no such thing really. You can break every rule in the book and still, if you're lucky, make something beautiful. The only thing you can't do is get it right. Well, you can, but it's such a subjective right that it hardly exists."

"Which might be exciting or scary, depending on your point of view," Anna suggested.

"It's a funny business, this" Lynne said, nodding. "You can get really old people, in their eighties say, who the rest of the world would call great and you can see they're still learning: still trying and failing at things they couldn't master when they were eighteen. You have to be very persistent or very passionate or maybe a bit dim. I don't know."

"Thea isn't dim."

"No." Lynne agreed. "But I thought she was frightened."

"What of?"

"She didn't say. Maybe nothing specific. I was just rather sorry for her."

"That's funny," Anna said thoughtfully. "Everyone else seems to envy her."

New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard 1985)

A wire fence separated the Bajan sculptor's garage apartment and yard from the Robert E. Lee housing project. At least thirty black kids were playing some kind of grab-ass on the other side of the fence. They came over to the fence to stare at Hoke while he pulled into the narrow backyard and parked. There was a huge sculpture of a birdlike creature in the yard, blocking the way to the closed door of the garage. The wings were fashioned from automobile fenders, and the body was formed with welded auto parts. The "bird" had been painted with red rustproofing primer, and its eyes were red glas taillights. The eyes were unlighted, and Hoke wondered for a moment if the sculptor would wire them for electricity when he was finished with the sculpture. He then realized that he didn't give a shit what the sculptor decided to do, because he would never have to look at it again.

Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni (Melville International Crime 1985)

There was an unbearable buzzing in my eyes. My hand struck, time and again, but its aim was off. Ear, nose, mouth - mercilessly it attacked them all. I turned away, turned back again. No way. This was murder. Finally I opened my eyes and located the damned fly. Fat and black it on the white coverlet. I took proper aim, then got up to wash my hands, taking care not to look in the mirror. I went to the kitchen, put some water on, looked for fresh filters. Before long this activity produced a cup of steaming hot coffee. It was August eleventh, nineteen eighty-three. My birthday.

Don't Be A Soldier! The Radical Anti-War Movement in North London 1914-1918 by Ken Weller (Journeyman Press 1985)

Much of available labour and socialist history is about institutions - parties, trade unions and similar organisations, on the anatomy rather than the physiology of the movement; while another substantial chunk is about individuals - usually those who have reached some sort of prominence. Both of these approaches can be valuable but they do not usually help us understand the confused matrix of the grass roots movements from which these individuals and organisations emerged, or how they articulated together. At worst much of what passed for labour/socialist history - particularly of the twentieth century - is little more than retrospective justfication, a hunt for apostolic or demonic successions and the legitimisation of this or that organisation or ideology, rather than an attempt to describe the rich and fertile contradictions of the movement as it was, and for that matter still is.
The struggle against the 1914-1918 war is often seen in a partial way, as being embodied in either the established socialist parties or in the pacifist movement. I hope that this text will show that the reality was much more substantial, complex and fruitful. What is clear - certainly in London and I suspect nationally too - was that the main origin of radical anti-war movement was not in the established socialist groups, or among middle-class pacifists, although both these currents made a contribution (and were themselves profoundly affected by the heat of the struggle); rather it lay in the 'rebel' milieu which had existed before the war - the syndicalist and industrial unionist movements within industry, the radical wing of the women's movement and the wide range of networks and organisations which by and large were very critical of the established labour movement.

[From Ken Weller's introduction.]