The Prisoner of Brenda by Colin Bateman (Headline 2012)

 

JMJ’s hands moved to her hips; it was the naval equivalent of taking battle formation.

‘Are you deliberately trying to provoke me?’

‘It’s a distinct possibility,’ I said.

‘You do know that there can only be one winner here?’

‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

‘What?’

‘A bird in the hand is—’

‘Enough! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I’ve had you down as a troublemaker from the moment you were carried in here, and now it’s right out in the open for everyone to see! Well, you listen to me, mister, we live by harmony here, not anarchy! These pizzas have been brought in from outside at not inconsiderable expense, as a special treat, but they’ll bloody well go in the bin if you continue with this outright . . . defiance – yes, that’s exactly what it is – defiance! Do you think I’m going to go without dinner tonight? No, but these poor souls, they certainly will if you do not see the error of your ways and apologise for your attitude and your behaviour. Immediately.’

Her stare was intense.

Michael slipped off his earphones. ‘Apologise, man, you’re not going to win.’

Joe said, ‘Do it, I’m starving.’

Malachy pointed a finger at me. ‘Say “you’re sorry. We get pizza once a month if we’re lucky. Don’t fuck it up.’

Andy stared at the pizzas.

JMJ raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’

Yes, her eyes were good, but she was no Nurse Brenda – or Alison, for that matter – and I knew my plan was good, and for every moment I held my silence I knew that it was drawing closer to fruition.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘have it your—’

I spoke. Muttered.

‘What was that?’ JMJ snapped. ‘If you’re going to apologise, speak up, let everyone hear you.’

I said, a little louder, ‘Food fight.’

She screwed up her eyes and leaned a little closer. ‘What was that?’

‘I said . . . FOOD FIGHT!’

I reached down and picked up one of the pizzas. It was cold and as firm as a discus. “The orderly looked from the pizza to me to JMJ and back, utterly confused and seeking direction.

JMJ began to say, ‘Put that d—’ but then had to duck as I Frisbeed it across the dining room towards her. It smeared off her left shoulder and hit the wall behind her, leaving a snail trail of cheese as it slipped to the floor.

‘C’mon!’ I yelled, urging the others to join in, ‘Food fight!’ I lunged at another pizza just as the orderly jumped at me, knocking me forwards and across the table. ‘Food fight!’ I screeched. He had me by the neck, pressing down. I screwed my head to one side and spat out: ‘C’mon, you half-wits! Food fight! This is your chance! C’mon!’

But they sat there, looking blankly at me. I managed to grab another pizza but a second orderly came rushing in and caught my hand and bent my fingers back until I let go and then they pulled me up and back and JMJ came round the table and put her face in mine and raised her hand and grabbed my cheek and pinched it between her fingers and twisted it and snarled, ‘Anything you want to say now?’

‘Yes . . . yes!’

‘Well?’

‘You don’t eat pizza with forks, you fucking witch!’

‘Pathetic!’ And she twisted my cheek even harder and it brought tears to my eyes and she smiled and said, ‘Take him to his room and lock him in, and I don’t want to see him until breakfast. You can have a long hard think about your behaviour and I expect a full and sincere apology or I swear to God . . . !'

Dr. Yes by Colin Bateman (Headline 2010)

 

I have never in my whole life actually physically pursued a case, because any kind of activity requiring increased motor function is something I have to be wary of, but I could hardly help myself. Of course I didn't know it was a case then. Then it was just a man walking past my window - but what a man! You see, in my field of crime fiction, Augustine Wogan was an enigma, a myth wrapped up in a legend, a barely published novelist and screenwriter who was known to so few that they didn't even qualify as a cult following, it was more like stalking. He was, nevertheless, Belfast's sole contribution to the immortals of the crime-writing genre. His reputation rested on three novels self-published in the late 1970s, novels so tough, so real, so heartbreaking that they blew every other book that tried to deal with what was going on over here right out of the water. Until then, novels about the Troubles had invariably been written by visiting mainland journalists, who perhaps got most of their facts right, but never quite captured the atmosphere or the sarcasm. Augustine Wogan's novels were so on the ball that he was picked up by the RUC and questioned because they thought he had inside information about their shoot-to-kill policy; shot at by the IRA because they believed he had wrung secrets out of a drunken quartermaster; and beaten up by the UVF because they  had nothing better to do. He had been forced to flee the country, and although he had returned since, he had never, at least as far as I was aware, settled here again. I occasionally picked up snippets of information about him from other crime- writing aficionados, the latest being that he had been employed to write the screenplay for the next James Bond movie, Titter of Wit, but had been fired for drunkenness. There was always a rumour of a new novel, of him being signed up by a big publisher or enthusiastic agent, but nothing ever appeared in print. The books that made up the Barbed-Wire Love trilogy were never republished. They are rarer than hen's teeth. I regarded the box of them I kept upstairs as my retirement fund. In those few moments when I saw him pass the shop, I knew that if I could just persuade him to sign them, their value would be instantly quadrupled. They say money is at the root of all evil, but I have to be pragmatic. I am devoted to crime fiction, but I am also devoted to eating, and Augustine Wogan was just the meal ticket I was looking for.

The Day of the Jack Russell by Colin Bateman (Headline 2009)

 

'Shaking the tree.’

Alison was aghast. ‘You . . . at a funeral . . . you . . . caused that . . . You’re supposed to be our Chief Constable, you’re supposed to be . . .’

‘. . . a lot of things. Listen to me. I’m sure you’re perfectly decent people, in your little bookshop, and your nice lives. Yes, you dabble in your private investigations, so maybe you’ve seen a few things, but you don’t understand what’s really going on, you don’t see the bigger picture. People think the Troubles are all over, but they’re not, they’re just different Troubles, some of it historic, some of it imported, most of it we just won’t know about till it comes up and bites us on the arse. But it’s my job to keep watch, and it doesn’t help when people are constantly trying to undermine me. So I have to flush them out, because keeping an eye on the likes of MI5 there’s a genuine danger that the forces of evil will slip through. I, we, cannot afford that, so sometimes I have to do something that shows them who’s boss. Do you understand me?’

I nodded. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone say forces of evil outside of a comic book.

Alison said, ‘You blew up a funeral.’

‘For the greater good.’

Alison shook her head at him. And then at me.

‘I should send the both of you round to apologise. This isn’t a bloody game.’

She was right, it wasn’t.

Games have more rules.

Mystery Man by Colin Bateman (Headline 2009)

'Bookselling is hard, ladies and gentlemen. It's relentless. The books just keep coming. Beans don't change, peas are peas are peas, but books are always evolving. There's bugger-all profit, the hours are extraordinary and the shoplifters are stupid, because you can just borrow the bloody things from the library. You can't borrow beans.'

I studied them. They studied me.

I nodded. 'No, sir,' I said, 'you can't borrow beans.'

Several guests, unfamiliar with my ways, glanced to the door, as if realising that they'd been hooked by a free sausage roll into attending a three-hour time-share sales pitch. Others, on more familiar territory, waited for me to get to the point. The Mayerovas never took their eyes off me.

'We do it because it's a labour of love,' I continued, 'we do it because we think it's important. And here, we do it because we like to champion the underdog, the bastard outcast of literature we like to call mystery fiction. I often say, give me a young man uncorrupted by the critics, and I will make him a crime aficionado for life.'

Alison cleared her throat. Feet shuffled. DI Robinson rose and fell.

I was not to be deterred. This was my time.

'I have made a lifelong study of crime fiction. I have read all of the great works, and most of the middling ones, and many of the minor ones, and a lot of trash besides. There is virtually nothing about the solving of fictional crimes that I do not know, and what are fictional crimes but factual crimes with hats on? It seemed only natural to me when, a few short months ago, I was asked to help solve a real-life mystery that I should combine what I have learned about crime as a reader, and human nature as a bookseller, in pursuit of a solution to a fiendishly difficult case. Since that first triumph I have investigated many mysteries that previously had confounded the forces of law and order, and there is not one that I have not solved. But my most testing case, my most harrowing, and without doubt my most dangerous, walked through these very doors just a matter of days ago and it concerned the man whom, together of course with our esteemed senile author, we have come here tonight to pay tribute to: Daniel Trevor.'

I pressed the miniature PowerPoint button in my hand, and a picture of Daniel Trevor appeared on the wall behind me. There were a few hushed oooohs from my captive audience. And they were captive. 

One of DI Robinson's undercover comrades had locked the front doors.

'Daniel Trevor . . . murdered last week.

The Guts by Roddy Doyle (Alfred A. Knopf 2013)

—You just said you loved it.

—Yeah. Because it’s shite.

—Ah, for fuck sake, listen. Nobody’s buyin’. The kids don’t think they have to.

—They download it for nothin’.

—Yeah, said Jimmy.—Exactly. My age group an’ a bit younger, we still buy. But they don’t buy much. An’ very little that’s new.

—Make a video.

—We’re goin’ to —

—A good one, said his da.—Make us laugh. Get your woman from the Rubberbandits video.

—You know the Rubberbandits?

—Of course I know the fuckin’ Rubberbandits.

The Rubberbandits were a pair of clever lads from Limerick who wore SuperValu bags over their heads, and rapped. Their song, ‘Horse Outside’, was the new national anthem. Jimmy hated them.

—More than eight million YouTube hits, said Jimmy.

—Twice as many as live in this poxy country, said his da.—It’s the way to go.

—But only about nine thousand bought the song, said Jimmy.

The misery in that statistic pleased him, all the noughts in the millions falling away – the state of the fuckin’ world.

Driving Big Davie by Colin Bateman (CB Creative Books 2004)

Everyone worth knowing knows exactly where they were when they heard Joe Strummer was dead. I know exactly where I was. I was sitting in a private room in a private hospital, trying to wank into a cup.

This probably needs some explaining.

Not everyone knows who Joe Strummer is. Or was. Joe was rock'n'roll.

He was The Clash.

For my generation, he was the man.

He sang 'White Riot' and 'Garageland' and 'London  Calling' and 'Know Your Rights'. He ran the tightest, wildest, most exciting beat combo in history.

He made music important. He changed lives in a way that Spandau Ballet or The Hollies never could. 

He was my Elvis, my Beatles, and he never got fat, or bland, or shot.

The world is indeed cruel. I know that more than most people. And I take refuge from that cruelty in the music of my youth.

Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (Corgi Books 1984)

 

'A little blasphemy won't send you packin' t'Hell, Mrs Scully.'

"If it does, there's a lot of people who've done us down I'd like t'meet there. We were brought up in the Depression, me an' his dad, an' then through the blitz an' bloody ration books, an' that joker with his 'y've never had it so good'; aye f'them what's always had it. An' then a few good years just t'trick yer into thinkin' things're goin' t'work out alright, before the world turns around an' hits y'kids in the face. It's never them at the top what suffer though, it's us down here what have t'go through it, as far as I can see. An' whatever the politicians say, it's always goin' t'be the same. It all comes back t'those that can least afford it.'

A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (Penguin Books 1931)

'What was going on in Radek’s mind? He had pulled off his perfect crime. It had gone smoothly down to the very last detail. Nobody suspected him.

‘It was what he had wanted: he was the only person in the entire world who knew the truth! And when he saw the Crosbys sitting round their table in the bar, he thought that one word from him would be enough to put the fear of God into them!

'And yet he wasn’t satisfied. His life was still just as dull. Nothing had changed except that two women were dead, and a poor devil was about to have his head cut off.

‘I couldn’t swear to it, but I’d bet that what weighed most heavily on him was that he had no one to admire him. No one who’d murmur as he passed by:

‘“He’s not much to look at but he committed one of the most perfect crimes imaginable! He outsmarted the police, fooled the courts and changed the course of several lives.”

‘It’s something that’s happened to other murderers. Most of them have felt the need to confide in somebody, even if it was only some tart they’d picked up.

‘But Radek was above that. Anyway, he was never much interested in women.

‘Then one morning the papers reported that Heurtin had escaped. Wasn’t this the opportunity he’d been looking for? He decided to give the cards another shuffle and take an active part once more.

'He wrote to Le Sifflet. He took fright when he saw his erstwhile accomplice watching him and delivered himself up into the hands of the police … But what he wanted was admiration … He wanted to be known as a man who played a good hand.'

Scully by Alan Bleasdale (Arrow Books 1984)

 

'Yes Mam, alright Mam. I'll go an' tell her now,' he said and got his jacket on and went out.

As soon as he’d gone, I whipped over and had a look at his letter to nobody that he thought he’d hidden in last week's TV Times. It was another in his series of ace letters to Tranmere Rovers. He’s written at least two more to them that I know of.

Dear Sir,

 I was on the King Blessed Vergeins Playing feelds Eastbank last Sunday watching the Football Match Between Astley United And Garston Bakereries in Div. 9 of the Liverpool F.A. Sunday leeges and my Atension was atracted by the centre forward for Astley United. Sir. I tell no lie when I say that in all my many years Watching and referring football off all clases, I have not often enough seen Talint like what this PlaYEr has got. He his scilful, too footed and a gooD header off the ball. He is strong in the takle a gooD dribler and not a CowErd. I found out that is name is Antony James Patrick Scully and that he his twenty years old next birthday and that he lives in 47 Sankey Road, Eastbank, It wooD be a crying shamE if some BIG CLub did not spot him BEFOUR IT HIS TO LATE.

p.s. I am noT Related to this BOy at ALL.

Yours truly.

An Old Age Pensionor.

You might find it funny but after you’ve read as many as I have, it gets a bit boring. I got me felt tip pen out and wrote, IVOR BOLLOCKOFF above where he’d put ‘Old Age Pensionor', and folded the letter up and stuck it back in the envelope.