Deadfolk by
Charlie Williams
pbk out June 04
(Serpent's Tail)
at £7.99
Recent British crime fiction has been a mite short of the kind of highly individual
writers like Daniel Woodrell or James Sallis of the US, whose writing is identifiable
from a sentence or two. James Hawes and Jeremy Cameron might come to mind. Now you can add Charlie
Williams to that list.
But the lead characters of Hawes and Cameron are sharp-eyed, wise-cracking
and intelligent. Charlie Williams's prime mover (and the teller of the tale) is Royston
Blake, Head Doorman at Hopper's Wine Bar and Bistro (read club), a job he tells us
that demands 'the total respect of his public'. Apparently unaffected by the death of his
wife in a mysterious fire at the club, Blake (few call him Royston, for reasons that
will become obvious) is a man who acts first and thinks later, one idea at a time and
with little thought of consequence.
So when the local low-lifes (comparatively speaking), name of Munton, start
bothering him, spreading rumours that Blake has lost his bottle, he resolves to put
them right, a course of action encouraged by Blake's mates, Legsy and Finney. But a
confrontation with Baz Munton one afternoon leads to a fight, and Blake kills him
with the monkey wrench he keeps for 'support' in the pocket of his leathers. He stows
the body in his cellar, only to find a day or so later that it has disappeared. Before long
Blake is mired in a noirish conspiracy that will tax his limited powers of intelligence
to the limit.
Putting the narrative in the hands of a monosyllabic thug may not seem the
wisest course for a young writer on his first novel. But Williams carries it off
brilliantly. Blake's bleakly comic narration perfectly mirrors his basic take on life,
whilst at the same time laying bare the often chilling logic of his pathology. The
dialogue too, cleverly regionally unspecific, is spot on. The pace is swift, the plot well
thought out, even a shade Hitchcockian here and there (a 'doofer' is crucial to later
developments). It's a gory story of course, at times shockingly violent (a chainsaw
called Susan makes a memorable appearance), one of assertive masculinity at its most
basic and brutal.
Blake is, of course, a classic noir protagonist, unwittingly setting in motion a
series of events which he is powerless to control. But he is not an unsympathetic
character. Mates is mates for instance, and birds, well you should never 'touch a bird
in anger.' His role models in fact are Clint Eastwood and 'Rocky' Stallone (not the
Rocky of films I or II but, felicitously, of Rocky III). And, whilst he reserves his most
poetic flights of fancy for his motor of choice, a Ford Capri 2.8i ('makes angels sing in
your ears'), he also loves the ladies. Thus, as we become aware of the perfidious
minefield that surrounds him, he begins to take on the mantle of an almost tragic
figure.
Williams's final masterstroke is the setting he creates for Blake, his birds and his
mates. Mangel (was ever a place so appropriately named?) with its districts of Norbert
Green, Muckfield and East Bloater is something like the tenth circle of hell for, as
everyone knows, 'no-one leaves Mangel'. Indeed as the latter litany is repeated, time
and again, the place, whilst never losing its uncomfortable resemblance to that
benighted community not far from where you (and I) live, begins to take on an almost
mystical significance. It's another reason why I look forward to the next book in what
Charlie Williams has described as a trilogy. A noir trilogy, surely a contradiction in
terms? Not, I suspect, when it's set in Mangel.
Deadfolk by
Charlie Williams
