Tomorrow Is Another Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1995)

Elmo looked around his alley domain. Cars beeped and chugged on Main Street beyond the Farraday. Elmo seemed to listen and then touch his face.

“Just need another tomorrow,” he said. “And who’m I trying to impress, I ask you.”

“You’ve got a point,” I said. “But if you put the shave together with a bath, some clean clothes from Hy’s or Chi Chi’s Slightly Worn on Hoover, you might be able to line up a job.”

“Had one once,” Elmo said with a smile. “Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here …” He looked around, but there weren’t any guys. “Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket. 

"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You’re born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you’re dead. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo shook his head.

“So,” he went on, “the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can’t keep anyway. I’m not starvin’. I’m not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever.”

“I get your point, Elmo.”

“You think I could really get a job?” he asked, looking away from me. “I mean if I cleaned up okay?”

“Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy’s in the navy.”

Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard (Harper Collins 1974)

 

"You know melons, uh?”

“Melons, onions, lettuce, anything you got.”

“You want to work today?”

The girl seemed to think about it and then shrugged and said, “Yeah, well, since we forgot our golf clubs we might as well, uh?”

“After you go to the bathroom.” Majestyk’s gaze, with the soft hint of a smile, held on her for another moment.

“First things first,” the girl said.

“Listen, I don’t say they can’t use them,” the attendant said now. “You think I own this place? I work here.”

“He says he works here,” Majestyk said.

The girl nodded. “We believe it.”

“And he says since the toilets are broken you can use something else.” Majestyk’s gaze moved away, past the attendant and the shelves of lube oil and the cash register and the coffee and candy machines, taking in the office.

“What’re you doing?” The attendant was frowning, staring at him. “Listen, they can’t use something else. They got to get out of here.”

Majestyk’s gaze stopped, held for a moment before coming back to the attendant. “He says use the  wastebasket if you want,” and motioned to the migrants with his hands. “Come on. All of you, come on in.”

As two of the migrants came in hesitantly behind the girl, grinning, enjoying it, and the other two moved in closer behind her, the attendant said, “Jesus Christ, you’re crazy! I’m going to call the police, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Try and hold on to yourself,” Majestyk said to him quietly. “You don’t own this place. You don’t have to pay for broken windows or anything. What do you care?”

Paradise And Beyond: My Autobiography by Chris Sutton (Black and White Publishing 2011)

Vialli left me out of the FA Cup Final team to play Aston Villa at Wembley in the last competitive game of the season. I went to Ray Wilkins and he marked my card the night before the game that I wouldn’t be involved, not even on the bench. I hadn’t trained as well as I should have for a few weeks prior to that, wasn’t applying myself. This probably made Vialli’s mind up. I was looking forward to the season coming to an end and leaving the club, although nothing was certain at that stage. But I was always involved when I was fit. I really lost my cool at being left out for the final. I guess the previous nine months just came to a head and I exploded.

I spoke to Vialli after breakfast on the Saturday morning. We stood in a corridor. I told him he was a coward for not telling me to my face that I wouldn’t be involved in the final. Then I repeated that insult to him. He tried to explain to me why I was left out. I called him a coward for the third time and he wouldn’t accept it anymore. He told me if I said it one more time, he would knock me out. I didn’t say it for a fourth time. I shouldn’t have said that to him at all, as, over the piece, he was more than fair to me. I regret calling him a coward. It’s not something I’m proud of. I was totally unprofessional. I regret it and it was the last conversation we had. I acted like a spoilt brat. It was my fault. My strength of character let me down, nothing else. I paid the ultimate price that day for taking my foot off the pedal in training in the build-up to the final. It was the correct decision to leave me off the bench. To compound it, I behaved selfishly towards Vialli and he certainly didn’t deserve it on the day of such a big game. I’m still totally ashamed of my actions that day and Vialli deserved much better.

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press 1972)

 

Joe

The subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.

Most of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the moment was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two, and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it.

Except this one guy. He stood around on the other side of us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a suit, carrying an attaché case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest of the people up out of the manhole.

He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops! Gimmie gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”

Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”

They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”

It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”

I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.

My Life Closed Twice by Nigel Williams (Faber & Faber 1977)

 

6.30 a.m. Monday

On most of them, you see, I want revenge. I want to make them suffer. Revenge first of all, on that guy at the publishers. I recall his letter as faithfully as I can. I can’t bear to get it out from the pile.

Dear Martin Steel,

   I'm afraid I’m returning The Good The Bad and the Indifferent to you. Some of us here liked it a lot, but none of us (alas!) enough to publish.

    Do let me see anything else of yours.

Ronald Jones

Like your wife or your mother or your father. Just so long as it isn't a novel, short story, play or poem I’d love to see it. I mean—who does Ronald Jones think he is? What does he do on his free evenings? I can see him now—in a fetching leather bum-freezer—sitting with a few chosen friends in Charco’s wine bar in Chelsea.

And who, while we’re at it, are “some of us”? A sandpit full of trendies, up there in Bedford Square or wherever they hang out, lounging around like the last days of the Roman Empire and sneering at Manuscripts Received? Or is it just a stupid way of saying “Me”? Ronald Fucking Jones. Probably never even tried to write a novel. The ultimate one-upmanship.

Like the other week when I was with a Minor Poet, we met Davies, a zealous Talks Producer from Radio. It was about half past nine at night and the Minor Poet and 1 were having a steak in the canteen, prior to recording some of his verse. There, at a table in the corner, was Davies, moustache drooping, stooped over a plate of soup.

“What goes on?" I asked.

“Oh,“ says Davies, “just doing some typing."

Suspicious. So I said, lightly and airily to the Minor Poet, as we made our way down to the studios,

“I bet he’s writing a novel."

“Oh they’re all writing novels at the BBC," says the Minor Poet, “only none of them are any good, are they?" And he looked at me keenly.

I knew then that he’d rumbled me. How in God’s name does one conceal the fact that one writes novels? I really have tried to look as if I do something else with my leisure hours. I really have tried to do something else with my leisure hours actually but that’s not the point. The fact or point is that I have written about fifteen novels in the last five years. About a million and a half words. And, all around my room, stuck to the walls, the ceiling, the floor even, are short, pithy letters on thick paper, all beginning “Dear Martin Steel" why do they always use both names as if you were a kid at school?), and all of them saying, in one way or another “Piss off with your bloody awful books." Here's another:

Dear Martin Steel,

Yes I’ve read the two novels. I found Down The Corridor too long, and although I loved some of the dialogue and many of the set pieces from The Jellabies Move To 22a Camden Hill Gardens, I felt the joke didn't quite hold for two hundred pages!!!

Yours,

Elizabeth Jones

Elizabeth Jones. Probably a relation of Ronald’s. Probably his sister. And what makes the thing so bad is that Elizabeth Jones is, or was, my agent. A woman greatly loved by other rattlesnakes in the Literary World because (quote) of her “in-built shit-detector". Sure she’s got an in-built shit-detector—she detects shit and sells it to various publishers at enormous gain to herself. Only the other rattlesnakes in the Literary World call this “being in touch with things’’.

Just a couple more letters before I get on with the business proper. One of the mealier variety from a creature who works (believe it or not) at the BBC. Last year, as a desperate resort, I took to writing for television. It seemed such an easy option. One simply writes “Interior. Day. Brighton.” and there one is. I wrote a long (and quite funny) piece about a man who grows a pair of symbolic breasts and sent it to an acquaintance of mine from the Drama Department. Here is his reply:

Dear Martin,

  Now you’re really going to hate me for this! You see, I think Serenade on a Rainy Day is a good idea and a well written idea, but I think you haven’t really come to terms with what television wants from a play (if you see what 1 mean). One has to do things that one feels it right to do now and I think that is the situation one is in here (really).

 

   If we want to be particular I think that when David meets Julie on the station, from that moment on we really are unsure as to whether he is only doing this for Karen or whether his antics in the Department are a factor. And once that is exploded the whole David/Karen thing is no go.

Agree?

Paul

P.S. Let’s meet and talk.

Let’s not, Paul. Let’s avoid each other for ten years, and, at the end of that period I will supervise a small but tasteful ceremony at which slices will be cut off your behind and served (with garlic bread) at a hootenanny for Script Editors. And, while we’re at it Paul, when my sixteenth novel hits the bookstalls and you’re catching up with my (unlisted) phone number—you will not get so much as an Italian meal out of me. When you ask for the Television Rights, I shall refer you to my new agent, a Greek half-wit from Camden Town, whose only other authors are world-famous playwrights and celebrities. I will make you crawl, Paul. Agree?

Call for the Dead by John le Carré (Penguin 1961)

 

Why did she do it?’ Mendel asked suddenly.

Smiley shook his head slowly: ‘I think I know, but we can only guess. I think she dreamt of a world without conflict, ordered and preserved by the new doctrine. I once angered her, you see, and she shouted at me: “I’m the wandering Jewess,” she said; “the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers.” As she saw the new Germany rebuilt in the image of the old, saw the plump pride return, as she put it, I think it was just too much for her; I think she looked at the futility of her suffering and the prosperity of her persecutors and rebelled. Five years ago, she told me, they met Dieter on a skiing holiday in Germany. By that time the re-establishment of Germany as a prominent western power was well under way.’

‘Was she a communist?’

‘I don’t think she liked labels. I think she wanted to help build one society which could live without conflict. Peace is a dirty word now, isn’t it? I think she wanted peace.

'And Dieter?’ asked Guillam.

‘God knows what Dieter wanted. Honour, I think, and a socialist world.’ Smiley shrugged. ‘They dreamt  of peace and freedom. Now they’re murderers and spies.’

‘Christ Almighty,’ said Mendel.

Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football by Daniel Gray (Bloomsbury 2016)

 

When I was a teenager, I startled a geography teacher. This had nothing to do with arable farming, and everything to do with European cities. During a test, it turned out that I knew the capitals of Serbia and Albania, Finland and Croatia. This was something of a surprise for me too. Behind my back, the European Cup and editions of World Soccer had sewn this knowledge into my brain.

Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out by David Ranney (PM Press 2019)

 

I am suddenly interrupted from this reverie by an annoying ding from my cellphone. It is a CNN news alert about yet another presidential tweet. In this one the president claims that his proposed tax reform will bring “middle-class jobs” back to the U.S. For some reason this really sets me off. Feeling angry and agitated, my mind goes back forty years to a time when I was working in a number of factories in Southeast Chicago. It was another time in my life, one when I was both an outsider looking into the world of the factory workers and an insider looking out at the outside world.

I realized that the perspective I gained then is still with me today and accounts for my anger at the simplistic notion of “bringing back middle-class jobs.” So I began to write about that time in my life, not as a memoir but as an account of life and even death on the factory floor, the raw class and race relations, the exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor, and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Sharing that perspective with others today seems timely and important.

In 1973, I was comfortably employed as a tenured professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was a time of great optimism and hope that we could replace a society based on greed, sexism, racism, and wars aimed at global domination with something new. I strongly believed, and still do, that we can achieve a totally new society in which “the full and free development of every human being is its ruling principle.” It would be a society where the measure of wealth would be, in Marx’s words, “the needs, capacities, enjoyments, and creative abilities” of each individual.

As these ideas were forming in Iowa City in the early 1970s, I was highly involved in local political and social activities, including opposition to the Vietnam War, supporting the demands of various civil rights groups, critiquing the political outlook of textbooks used in major survey courses at the University of Iowa, and experimenting with new social forms by organizing cooperative daycare, food co-ops, and housing co-ops. I helped to develop community education events about both the Vietnam War and the Southern African wars for national liberation from colonial powers. The political work and political education were intense and productive, but I increasingly began to feel that we were operating in a bubble that didn’t really extend beyond Iowa City. I longed to engage the growing social justice and revolutionary movements all over the world and couldn’t really do so from my comfortable perch.

So I took a one-year leave of absence and moved to Chicago, following my Iowa City friend Kingsley, who had opened up a unique pro bono legal clinic he called the Workers’ Rights Center in a storefront office in Southeast Chicago. Initially I joined a socialist group called New American Movement (NAM) and worked in its national office but later joined the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) and began working with Kingsley in the Workers’ Rights Center.

By this time my one-year leave of absence at the University of Iowa had run out and so had my money. I made the difficult decision to leave academia. Many left-wing organizations, STO included, had members working in factories for a variety of reasons. STO believed, for reasons I will discuss at the end of this book, that a new society could be built from the initiatives of “mass organizations at the workplace.” So it made sense that my financial needs could best be met by working in Southeast Chicago factories. The work was consistent with STO priorities and also engaged the sort of people who were coming to the Workers’ Rights Center for legal help. This is how I came to work at a number of different factories from 1976 to 1982.

. . .

One night when I am leaving the plant, I have a flat tire. I open the trunk to get the jack and spare. Ken stops to help. I realize that the trunk is full of leaflets advocating Puerto Rican independence and freedom for Puerto Rican nationalist political prisoners. Ken picks a leaflet up and reads it. He says nothing about it as he lifts the spare tire out while I jack up the car and remove the flat tire. He puts the flat tire back in the trunk and helps me lift the spare onto the car. Then he goes back and shuts the trunk, and we finish bolting the tire on. When we are finished:

“Thanks Ken.”

“I’m with Workers World. Who are you with?”

“Sojourner Truth Organization. Fifteen guys working here and two are commies. Who would have guessed? Any more?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well thanks and let’s Free the Five Puerto Rican Prisoners of War! Why not try to recruit the prick? Workers World can have him.”

Ken laughs, and we go our separate ways. Politics never comes up again.”

Northline by Willy Vlautin (P.S. 2008)

 

Well, the lady fired me after the second time so I didn’t get another job or anything for the rest of the summer. I just laid around with the A/C on in the dark and rented movies. I saw Paul Newman first in Slap Shot, and I thought he was the funniest guy I’d ever seen. Plus he was so handsome. Then I started renting all his movies. When he’s young, like in Cool Hand Luke, he’s amazing. He’s really really handsome in that. Or in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But if you’ve ever seen Fort Apache, the Bronx, then you’d understand him. You ever seen that one?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘He’s older in it and he falls in love with a nurse. She’s really beautiful, but she’s a junkie and lives in a horrible part of New York City. But she’s a good person, she’s just had a hard life. Paul Newman is a cop and he’s tough and strong, but he’s also really nice. He’s just tired and worn out ’cause being a policeman in New York City is an awful job. Anyway, there’s this scene where the nurse and him are together, and she’s really exhausted so he makes her a bath. He puts bubbles in it and shakes the water so the bubbles get extra bubbly and he sits with her while she lays in the water. It’s hard to explain, but it just kills me. As sad as it is to admit, he’s probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.’

‘Paul Newman?’

‘Any time I get worried or my anxieties start in, I just think about Paul Newman. Sometimes it’s hard to get him here, but most of the time he shows up. Ever since that summer, it’s been like that.

El Diego by Diego Armando Maradona (Yellow Jersey Press 2005)

Brazil have sold the world this idea that they’re the only ones capable of the jogo bonito, of playing beautifully ... bollocks! We can also do the jogo bonito, we just don’t know how to sell it. Brazilians always think everything is tudo hem, tudo legal and they’re all mellow, whereas for us when it’s not tudo bem it’s not cool and fuck the lot of them. We stop people short and knock them out one by one. That’s how we are and I don’t have a problem with that. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Brazilian way of life, I like them, but in football, I want to beat them to the death. They’re My Rivals, with capital letters.

Nightfall by David Goodis (Centipede Press 1947)

 

Vanning put another cigarette in his mouth, had no desire to light it. He put his hand in front of his eyes, wondered why his fingers weren't shaking. Perhaps he had gone beyond that. Perhaps it was actually a bad sign, his steady fingers. He sat there, his head lowered, feeling sorry for himself, sorry for every poor devil who had ever stumbled into a spot like this. And then, gradually lifting his head, he gradually smiled. It was such a miserable state of affairs that it was almost comical. If people could see him now their reactions would be mixed. Some of them would have pity for him. Others would smile as he was smiling at this moment. Maybe some of them would laugh at him, as they would laugh at Charlie Chaplin in hot water somewhere up in the Klondike. 

      

He sighed. He thought of other men, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, working in factories, in offices, and going back tonight to a home-cooked meal, sitting in parlors with their wives and kids, listening to Bob Hope, going to sleep at a decent hour, and really sleeping, with nothing to anticipate except another day of work and another evening at home with the family. That was all they looked forward to, and Vanning told himself he would give his right arm if that was all he could look forward to. 

      

“Callahan?” 

      

“Yes?” 

      

“Just stay there. Be with you in a jiffy. We're still talking to Seattle on another phone.” 

      

“Make it snappy, will you?” 

     

 “Be right with you.” 

A Tournament Frozen in Time: The Wonderful Randomness of the European Cup Winners Cup by Steven Scragg (Pitch Publishing 2019)

 

Dinamo Tbilisi will mean nothing to an entire generation of football watchers, yet to my generation they will elicit an enigmatic smile and maybe even a moistening of the eye. It might sound strange to the uninitiated, but you’d be amazed just how many British football supporters go misty-eyed with joy at the memory of seeing their team of choice being knocked out of European competition by what would colloquially be referred to as a ‘crack eastern European outfit’.

Of those great unknown sides to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain, Dinamo Tbilisi were one of the most clinical and unremitting. Fast and precise, they hit you on the break and they hit you hard. For those who saw them, they were unforgettable.

In the quarter-finals, at the beginning of March 1981, West Ham United were systematically dismantled by Dinamo Tbilisi at Upton Park.

Slicing straight through the West Ham midfield and defence time and time again, they enabled Aleksandre Chivadze, Vladimir Gutsaev and Ramaz Shengelia to score goals that were as beautiful as they were devastating. Ray Stewart, the West Ham right-back and penalty-taker extraordinaire was particularly tormented by the Dinamo Tbilisi offensive. He was caught in precarious possession of the ball for the second goal, when ludicrously left to man the West Ham defence all on his own.

What made the situation so ludicrous was that Stewart’s team-mates had piled forward, as if chasing a last-minute equaliser, when instead, the first leg of the game was only 31 minutes old. Everything was still to play for. 

West Ham had fallen a goal behind a mere seven minutes earlier and even by the standards of March 1981 this was an admirably gung-ho approach from John Lyall and his players.

One botched corner, a lofted Dinamo Tbilisi clearance, an ill-advised header from Stewart and a flash of the white-shirted Gutsaev later, and the ball was once again in the back of Phil Parkes’s net. It was as shocking as it was swift.

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin (Open Road 1963)

 

The newspapers call the Mets fans “The New Breed.” This is a good name, but there is more to it than this. It goes deeper. As the Mets lost game after game last season, for example, you heard one line repeated in place after place all over town. It probably started in a gin mill someplace with a guy looking down at his drink and listening to somebody talk about this new team and how they lost so much. Then it got repeated, and before long you were even hearing it in places on Madison Avenue.

“I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”

Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller? 

Plays: 1 by Sue Townsend (Methuen Drama 1996)

 

Act One

Scene One

A small classroom in a Victorian school is furnished with tiny chairs and tables, a square of carpet, floor cushions, the usual creche teaching aids: beans in jars, a goldfish nature table, blackboard, wendy house, bricks, little library and jars of paint. On the walls are real children’s paintings,(3 to 5 years old). There is one door and a large stock cupboard facing the audience.

Voices are heard and keys rattle at the door. The door opens. Kevin, the caretaker, opens the door with some ceremony. He switches on the lights. He is wearing a short brown caretaker’s coat, badges decorate the lapels. Underneath he wears a baggy ‘Damned’ T-shirt , blue jeans, big studded belt and training shoes. A copy of the Sun newspaper is sticking out of one pocket, a plastic container of darts is in his top pocket. His hair is slicked back 1950s American style. He is wearing one long dangling earring. His right hand is bandaged.

Kevin ( as he puts the lights on ) Here we go.

Joyce enters the room. She is middle-class, expensively and conventionally dressed, and is carrying an ‘organiser’ handbag. 

Kevin (indicates the room) This do you?

Joyce What is it?

Kevin It’s the creche.

Joyce So why are you showing it to me? 

Kevin It’s your room.

Joyce I’m teaching adults and I expect them to be the usual average height. (She picks up a tiny chair with one finger.) Could I see a proper classroom please?

She turns to leave.

Kevin There ain’t one.

Groping for Words was first presented at the Croydon Warehouse Theatre on 10 March 1983.

Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle (Vintage 2019)

 

Talk to Joe.

–I will in me hole!

It’s not a sudden thing, or a late vocation. I’ve been shouting at the eejits on the radio all my life. Some men learn how to play the uilleann pipes from their fathers; others are taught how to mend fishing nets, how to keep bees or maim cattle. My da showed me how to shout.

He spent long happy hours instructing me on the correct use of the word ‘gobshite’. He didn’t know he was doing this; I was just looking at him, and listening. But, nevertheless, that was what he did. I sat in the kitchen with him and learnt all about the different categories of gobshite. There was the ‘bloody’ gobshite, the ‘out and out’ gobshite, and the ‘complete and utter’ gobshite. There was a gobshite for every occasion, a label for every man he shouted at. A younger man just starting out in his career as a gobshite – a newly elected TD, say, or an economist just home from America who wore a cravat instead of a tie – he had ‘the makings of a gobshite’. There was still hope for him, but not much. The makings of a gobshite almost always rose through the ranks to become a complete and utter gobshite.

He never shouted at women. Now, there weren’t many women on the wireless back then but he wouldn’t have shouted at them anyway. In my father’s world there was no such thing as a female gobshite.

Nick's Trip by George Pelecanos (Back Bay Books 1993)

 

The night Billy Goodrich walked in I was tending bar at a place called the Spot, a bunker of painted cinder block and forty-watt bulbs at the northwest corner of Eighth and G in Southeast. The common wisdom holds that there are no neighborhood joints left in D.C., places where a man can get lost and smoke cigarettes down to the filter and drink beer backed with whiskey. The truth is you have to know where to find them. Where you can find them is down by the river, near the barracks and east of the Hill.

An Arctic wind had dropped into town that evening with the suddenness of a distaff emotion, transforming a chilly December rain into soft, wet snow. At first flake’s notice most of my patrons had bolted out of the warped and rotting door of the Spot, and now, as the snow began to freeze and cover the cold black streets, only a few hard drinkers remained.

One of them, a gin-drenched gentleman by the name of Melvin, sat directly in front of me at the bar. Melvin squinted and attempted to read the titles of the cassettes behind my back. I wiped my hands lethargically on a blue rag that hung from the side of my trousers, and waited with great patience for Melvin to choose the evening’s next musical selection.

Melvin said, “Put on some Barry.”

Shoedog by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown and Company 1994)

 

“Hold on a second,” Constantine said. “There’s something I gotta know.”

“What?” Polk said.

“In the meeting, you told Grimes that if something happened to you, your share would go to me.” Constantine stared into the bright blue of Polk’s eyes. “Why?”

Polk smiled. “It’s simple, Connie. That day I picked you up hitchhiking—I asked you for a smoke. Well, you probably don’t remember, but you gave me your last one. It was a small thing to do, I know. But it’s been a long time since someone’s done that. It meant something. It meant something, to me.” Polk smiled at Constantine.

“Take it easy, Polk.”

“You too, kid.”

Divided City by Theresa Breslin (Random House 2005)

 

Footsteps.

Running.

Graham didn’t hear them at first.

He was walking fast, eating from his bag of hot chips as he went. Taking a detour via Reglan Street. The kind of street his parents had warned him never to be in. The kind of street where your footsteps echoed loud, too loud – because there was no one else about.

From either side the dark openings of the tenement building mawed at him. It was the beginning of May and fairly light at this time in the evening. But even so . . . Graham glanced around. The sky was densely overcast and shadows were gathering. He shouldn’t have lingered so long after football training.

Graham dug deep into the bag to find the last chips, the little crispy ones soaked in vinegar that always nestled in the folds of paper at the bottom. He wiped his mouth and, scrunching up the chip paper, he threw it into the air. When it came down he sent it rocketing upwards, powered by his own quality header. The paper ball spun high above him. Graham made a half turn.

Wait for it . . . wait for it . . .

Now.

‘Yes!’ Graham shouted out loud as his chip bag bounced off a lamppost ten metres away. An ace back-heeler! With a shot like that he could zap a ball past any keeper right into the back of the net. He grinned and thrust his hands in the air to acknowledge the applause of the fans.

At that moment noise and shouting erupted behind him, and Graham knew right away that he was in trouble.

Footsteps.

Running.

Coming down Reglan Street. Hard. Desperate.

Pounding on the ground. Beyond them, further away, whooping yells and shouts.

‘Get the scum! Asylum scum!

Before We Was We: The Making of Madness by Madness (with Tom Doyle) (Virgin Books 2019)

 

LEE: Roxy Music were a big influence. Myself, Mike and Chris went to see them at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park when the Stranded album had just come out. We saw David Essex going in, with a blonde lady friend, and they were dressed to the nines. Our mate John Jones goes, ‘He’s got a bit of a flash car.’ He had some convertible Merc and I can’t remember if the roof was down or not, but I know we got in it. Inside, he had one of those new-fangled eight-track tape players. We thought, ‘Oh, they must cost a fortune.’ So, we ended up having several of his eight-track tapes away.

Then, we bunked into the gig. Supporting was Leo Sayer. I got on someone’s shoulders – probably Mike’s, because he’s tall – and hauled myself up onto a window ledge, because I’d noticed it was on the latch. As I climbed up and looked in this window, there’s Leo Sayer, putting his makeup on. He’s got that clown’s outfit on that he wore around that time. He had all the gear on and one red cheek. He turned round, and I went, ‘Can you let us in?’ He was like, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’ I’m going, ‘We’ve come to see you, though, Leo …’ Have we fuck! But he said, ‘I can’t, obviously,’ and I descended back down.

MARK: Lee always told me that Leo Sayer mimed, ‘I can’t let you in,’ in Marcel Marceau style …

A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin (Orion 2020)

 

But it wasn’t his need to pee that woke him at 5 a.m. It was a call. He fumbled for both his phone and the bedside lamp, waking Brillo in the process. He couldn’t quite focus on the screen but pressed the phone to his ear anyway.

‘Dad?’ His daughter Samantha’s urgent voice.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, sitting up, growing more awake by the second.

‘Your landline – it’s been cut off.’

‘I meant to tell you about that … '

'About what?’

‘My landline’s not the reason you’re calling at this hour. Is it Carrie?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘What then? Are you all right?’

‘It’s Keith.’

Her partner; Carrie’s father. Rebus swallowed. ‘What’s happened?’ He listened as Samantha began to sob quietly. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

‘He’s gone.’

‘The bastard … ’

‘Not like that … I don’t think so anyway.’ She sniffed. ‘I mean, I don’t really know. He’s disappeared. It’s been two days.’

‘And things were all right at home?’

‘No worse than usual.’

‘But you don’t think he’s just – I don’t know – maybe gone on a bender somewhere?’

‘He’s not like that.’

‘You’ve reported him missing?’

‘They’re sending someone to talk to me.’

‘They probably told you two days isn’t long?’

‘Yes. But his phone just goes to voicemail.’

‘And he didn’t pack a bag or anything?’

‘No. We’ve got a joint bank account – I looked online and he’s not bought anything or taken money out. His car was left in the lay-by near the church.'