London Noir editor Cathi Unsworth |
Gripping crime noir on our mean streets
Camden’s exciting and bustling streets have become the central point for a new generation of crime fiction, writes Matthew Lewin
London Noir, Edited by Cathi Unsworth, Serpent‚s Tail, £8.99 order this book
Camden is the new Soho and East End as far as crime writing is concerned. In the ’50s and ’60s the scribes had their villains skulking around the alleys off Wardour Street and the basement drinking dens of Dean Street.
But now the point of focus is more likely to be the mean streets of Camden Town, King’s Cross and Kentish Town which, to some extent at least, have inherited the vibrancy and excitement that places such as Soho used to have.
This is certainly reflected in a new collection of crime stories, London Noir, published this month by Serpent’s Tail.
The anthology was edited by Cathi Unsworth whose own contribution, Trouble is a Lonesome Town, is set in King’s Cross.
Reformed Edinburgh cat burglar Dougie meets the alluring and exotic Lola in a pub in King’s Cross, and is persuaded to carry out one last job before he retires. Lola, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be more than the sum or her delightful parts.
Another story is by Sylvie Simmons, who used to live in Kentish Town before she moved to Los Angeles last year.
Her story, I Hate His Fingers, involves a psychiatrist in NW5 who may be in need of some therapy himself since his confidant seems to be a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy.
Simmons is not very complimentary about Kentish Town Road, which she describes as “shabby, shapeless old buildings, oddly bent, like they’re about to collapse, though no one seems to notice or care. The whole street looks like an old tart with osteoporosis”.
Perhaps the most intriguing is the contribution by Jerry Sykes called Penguin Island, which conjures up a fascinating image from a bygone era in Camden Town.
Sykes, who has twice won the Crime Writers’ Association short story Dagger Award (in 1998 and 2003) has written a riveting story about the dissonant relationship between pensioner Eamonn Coughlan and a 12-year-old boy, Pete, who live on a council estate in Hawley Road, Camden Town.
At one stage Coughlan reminisces about the triangle of concrete and paving stones in the middle of the junction opposite the Camden Town underground station which, for as long as he can remember, has been known as Penguin Island.
Back in the days when people still went to church, men would gather there in their Sunday best after mass in the nearby Catholic church, waiting for the pubs to open at noon, while the women went home to cook lunch.
Sykes writes: “Standing there in their uniform black suits and white shirts, with their hands in their pockets, shuffling around on impatient feet, the men had resembled nothing so much as a squadron of penguins stranded in the middle of a sea of traffic.”
When I spoke to Jerry Sykes at his home in Constantine Road, Gospel Oak, he explained where he had found this wonderful image.
“I was writing a novel set in Camden Town and I wanted a lot of local flavour, so I started researching the area and came up with all kinds of things,” he says.
“I heard about Penguin Island on the Robert Elms show on Radio London, and it stayed vividly in my mind. You know, quite honestly, I don’t know if it’s true or not – although a friend of Cathi Unsworth’s father used to be the landlord of a pub in that area, and he remembers the men on the traffic island. He also remembered lining up pints on the bar in anticipation of the rush at opening time on a Sunday.”
Sykes, now 46, was born in Yorkshire but came to live in London some 20 years ago. He worked in the social housing field and although he had always been interested in writing, he had never had anything published until the 1990s when he became very interested in crime fiction.
“I was on holiday in New Orleans when I came across the extraordinary writing of James Lee Burke, and that inspired me to start writing about crime fiction,” he says.
On returning to London he met other crime writers, including John Harvey (then living in Hampstead) and Ian Rankin, and he started submitting reviews and interviews to a crime fiction fanzine called Shots.
That brought him to the attention of Ed Gorman, editor and publisher in the US of the Mystery Scene magazine, who had bought some of his interviews, and who encouraged him to write some crime fiction himself.
“I wrote one story from him, and he liked it, and it all took off from there. Once your work has started to appear, and you have been in one anthology, you start getting invitations to submit stories to others,” he said.
His novel Lose This Skin, due to be published in February, is also set in Camden Town, on the same estate as the one in Penguin Island, and tells the story of two mothers with dead sons who try do do something about the drug dealers in the area.
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