Lucy Clayburn hits the mean streets again

As you can tell, the countdown is well and truly on.

STOLEN, the third book in the Lucy Clayburn series, is taking up much of my bandwidth and much of Avon’s as we fast approach publication date on May 16, and I’m going to be talking a bit more about it this week. 

Okay … I’ll come clean and admit it. Much of today’s blog is going to be a blatant trailer for STOLEN. In fact, I’ve even decided to snip out a few choice excerpts and print them on here, so you can judge for yourselves whether it’ll be the book for you.

In addition to that, because I never like to talk purely about myself, I’ll also be reviewing and discussing the late, great William Gay’s marvellous novel, TWILIGHT.

Now, before we go any further, and I can’t stress this firmly enough. It’s not that Twilight, the one about the wistful young lass in love with a vampire. This TWILIGHT is a classic slice of Southern Noir, a grim crime-thriller set in the Tennessee back-country of the 1950s, and it’s got just about everything you’d expect from that genre: grime, poverty, mystery, passion, savage violence, bizarre perversion and even magical realism.

If the TWILIGHT review is the main reason you’re here, you’ll find it, as always, at the lower end of today’s blogpost. Feel free to zoom on down there and get stuck into it straight away. If, on the other hand, you’re keen to know a little more about STOLEN – which I like to think also has a wide range of aspects to it (it’s not just a murder mystery) – then stick around at this end of the blog, and I’ll take you through some of the treats waiting between its covers.

Hardboiled Manchester

I don’t write cosy crime. I don’t do village greens or country house murder mysteries. It’s not that I disrespect those subgenres, it’s just that they’re not for me. My own thrillers are purposely gritty, visceral and urban. I do everything I can, in truth, to tick the ‘hardboiled’ box.

For the uninitiated, ‘hardboiled’ is a subdivision of crime fiction which enmeshes its central character – often a police officer, journalist, or private eye – in the seedy world of inner city organised crime, and is set against a background of vice and corruption. Embittered by their experiences in this terrible time and place, the heroes themselves often become antiheroes who will bend many rules to get a result.

Those who read my cop novels will recognise this as home territory from the off, though I think, with the Lucy Clayburn series, we put our own spin on it. Lucy is a female, after all, a young detective constable who works local CID. She has no real power but is increasingly up against it because her home patch of Crowley, aka November Division, is an unruly Manchester borough where poverty, drugs and crime are out of control. She also has one particular problem that would make her unique among police officers in the UK. 

Raised by a single mother, a former stripper now turned respectable citizen, Cora Clayburn, Lucy was only introduced to her father, Frank McCracken, when she was 30 years old and a 10-year police veteran, and was stunned to find out that, though he’d first met and had had a relationship with her mum when he was a doorman at a Manchester nightclub three decades ago, he has now advanced in his career and become a major player in the Crew, the city’s most dangerous crime syndicate.

As such, Lucy finds herself walking an inevitable tightrope between her own world of on-the-hoof law-enforcement and street-policing and her father’s world of violence and racketeering.

I chose Manchester as the backdrop to this dark melodrama, not just because it was my own patch when I was a serving police officer, but also because it’s the grandest of all those great, bustling, post-industrial northern metropolises. Its centre is the soul of modernity and commerce, though its outer districts (one of which I was born and grew up in) are much less to write home about. The division I myself worked in as a cop, upon which Crowley (which is fictional) is loosely based, could pretty well be summed up as a big, dirty, noisy, chaotic, rain-soaked urban Hell.

Anyway, that’s the backdrop. Now to STOLEN, the third book in the series (though a series, all three of the books – the first two are STRANGERS and SHADOWS – can comfortably be read as stand-alones).

I’m not going to give you the outline, mainly because I don’t want to drop any spoilers, but also because the pitch is all over the internet now as the book is being advertised widely. However, as promised, I am going to take this opportunity to send a few trailers your way (so to speak):

The first thing you’ll notice in the Lucy Clayburn books, as I’ve been boasting all the way through this post, is the tough, frank cop stuff …  

‘I’ve not seen her today,’ Newt said. ‘Not yet. If she’s shooting up, she’ll be in the women’s toilets on that row of boarded-up shops. On the other side of Penrose Mill.’

Lucy nodded. ‘I know it.’

‘But I don’t think she’ll be there. Yesterday, she was saying something about going to services.’

‘Services?’

‘I don’t know exactly what it means, but . . . she said it once before when she was going to someone’s funeral.’

‘A funeral?’

‘I think so.’ He tried to remember more. ‘She said she wouldn’t be around till this evening because this afternoon she was attending services out on Fairview.’

‘Fairview?’ Lucy was bemused. ‘A funeral . . . on a landfill site?’

Newt shrugged again. ‘That’s all I can tell you. I didn’t ask, did I? Told you, she’s a nutcase. Christ knows what she gets up to most of the time.’

‘This is all I bloody need.’ Lucy thought about Fairview, that hideous, decayed wilderness, with its foul stenches and its drifting toxic smoke and its gangs of weirdo scavengers scrambling across it like beetles. ‘If this is wind-up, Newt, I’ll make your life a misery from here on. It’ll be stops-and-searches every time I see you. I’ve got good contacts in the Drug Squad, and I’ll make sure you go right to the top of their list.’

‘On my honour,’ he protested. ‘She’s taking a few others to attend services on Fairview.’

‘On your honour?’ Lucy shook her head. ‘Your honour. Are you serious?’ She grabbed him by the collar, lugged him from the wall and threw him along the passage with such force that he staggered and almost fell. ‘Get out of my sight, soft lad!’

He hurried off, walking stiffly without looking back.

‘I ever see you again,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll pop those zits with the dirtiest needle I can find!’

     We also have a bit of a rep for going all-out on the action front …

Lucy sped on, passing through the narrow doorway and entering a long, concrete passage that had never been intended for vehicles. Again, it was cluttered with debris, as though part of the ceiling had collapsed, which made it difficult going. A dark shape bobbing ahead of her revealed her fleeing prey, but before she could catch up with it, she reached a junction of passages obstructed by a wheeled cart that was loaded with wooden pallets.

Lucy braked sharply. She heard feet hammering away ahead as she leaped from her seat to shove it all aside. What this place had once been, she couldn’t fathom. Whatever it was, if the rest of the structure was anything to go by, it was likely to be labyrinthine, which was all she needed when her quarry had a head-start like this.

She clambered back onto her bike and accelerated forward at reckless speed. At the next intersection, she had to slow down to listen. Hearing an echoing clatter of rubble on her right, she swung her machine after it, accelerating again. It was the same at the next junction. Even with her headlamp on full beam, she now saw nothing but endless concrete tunnels telescoping ahead, black elongated nightmares along which her Ducati hopped and skipped as it cleared mound after mound of masonry. Some were so narrow that at times her handlebars all but carved their way along the walls and turned the reverberation of her engine into gunfire.

Lucy swore. She could have overhauled this suspect in any normal circumstances, but it was typical that she’d wound up pursuing in what had to be the only place in Crowley where the speed and power of her Ducati were nullified. At the same time, she found herself having to duck, as missiles came flying back from the fleeing form: bricks, discarded bottles, wooden laths heavy with cement. At least her adrenalin was up, dulling the thudding impacts on her body, the blows of bricks and cans, the crunch of smashing glass on her visor. But Lucy knew that she wasn’t immune to this punishment. If her headlight was taken out, that was it; she’d be marooned in this unlit maze, at the mercy of whoever this maniac was …

     I’ll also admit that I have a penchant for colourful and generally irredeemable villains:

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Lucy asked as she covertly tested her bonds.

     Torgau pondered. ‘It’s a good question, DC Clayburn. Most of my life, I’ve flown under the police radar. You can call it skill, you can call it luck, you can call it the Devil looking after his own. But after a lifetime dedicated to breaking the law – I mean, I’ve barely ever done an honest job and look at the life I lead – I have the smallest criminal record imaginable. So maybe, just maybe . . . this is an opportunity to show at least one of you what you’ve been missing. Cosy in the knowledge that it won’t mean a damn thing.’

‘Dad hasn’t told you what he was really good at yet,’ Torgau’s daughter chipped in.

Lucy saw that she’d lifted the poker from the flames and was blowing gently on its tip, which had started to glow.

This was Torgau’s cue to talk a little more about himself.

‘Wild Bill was impressed by my ability to steal,’ he said. ‘But what he really liked about me was how I excelled at violence. You may not believe that, because I’m not a big man. And back in Moston in the bad old days, when I was very young, that made me a target for every kind of bully. It began with my father, who hammered me regularly for the most minuscule things. But mainly it was this big kid in the neighbourhood – Arun Swaraj. He gave me a kicking every single day. Until my father saw it happen and refused to let me in the house afterwards. He put an empty milk bottle in my hand and said that I couldn’t come home until I’d smashed it over this guy’s head. I knew he meant it. So that was what I did. Arun went down like the pathetic sack of shit he was. But the really amazing thing was the way his wingmen ran away. My father taught me an important lesson that day, DC Clayburn. Violence works. Especially the nasty kind. The kind from which there is no coming back. That kind of violence doesn’t just earn you respect, it can actually earn you a living.’

     Like the hardboiled crime novels of the 1920s and 1930s, which were hugely concerned with the crime syndicates of the Prohibition-era US, Lucy Clayburn is often up to her neck in gangsters …

Formerly a pirate and smuggler in the pay of the Mungiki crime syndicate in Kenya, Zambala, despite a machine gun-toting youth in which he’d violently rejected all things western, had effortlessly adapted to the capitalist lifestyle of the UK. He was now in charge of narcotics, importation and distribution, and his annual contribution to company funds was greater by far than everyone else’s, so, though still an underboss, when he spoke, people listened.

‘Not three weeks ago, one of my sellers was fished out of a Fallowfield sewer.’ He took a sip of mineral water. ‘The guys responsible had put him down the sewer while he was still alive . . . minus his hands and feet, I should add. The cops reckon the chopping tool was a machete.’

Wild Bill pursed his thin grey lips. ‘Not an ideal situation. When our own people are getting their hands and feet chopped off.’

Frank McCracken was the only one who didn’t mutter his discontent. He was too busy wondering where all this was leading. He too had heard rumours that foreign powers were slowly muscling in on their action. Not so much his, maybe. He dealt mainly with those established British gangs who even after all these years still failed to recognise the Crew’s authority. But it was plain there was a foreign presence on the streets.

‘You’re very quiet, Frank,’ Pentecost suddenly said.

McCracken shrugged. ‘We might have to make deals, Bill.’

It wouldn’t be a cop thriller, at least not a realistic one, if it wasn’t filled with hints of the mysterious and the abnormal …

The problem with being a police officer – anywhere really, not just in a place like Crowley – was that you knew what went on behind the sometimes paper-thin façade of the local community. So Lucy wasn’t entirely surprised that night to look down the list of prisoners waiting in the traps at Robber’s Row police station, November Division’s HQ, to see that they included professional men with sedate family backgrounds: a senior civil servant, a local journalist, an estate agent, even a bank manager. There were louts and scallies among them too, all the usual suspects; but respectability was a keyword where several were concerned, or superficial respectability at least. Maybe, to an extent, she should have anticipated this, because dog-fighting wouldn’t have existed at all, even as an illegal sport, without the hefty cashflow it generated. It was only ever about gambling, and if you didn’t have the readies for that, you couldn’t participate.

‘Worrying, isn’t it?’ she said, scrolling down the file on the screen belonging to Sergeant Joe Cullen, the Robber’s Row custody officer. ‘Lots of these guys come over as perfect citizens . . . so able to create the impression they’re normal that they can function easily in everyday society. They do jobs efficiently and make them pay. They impress socially. They have friends, families. But deep down, they’re so disturbed that they derive pleasure from watching innocent animals rip each other apart. Either that, or they’re so indifferent to it that they don’t care so long as they make a few quid.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the thin end of the wedge, to be honest,’ Cullen replied. He was a foursquare old-schooler, with a weathered hangdog face and a brush of thick grey bristles on his head. ‘If they’re prepared to do this, what else are they up to? Like you say . . . they’re not normal.’

And I have been known, just occasionally, to stray into the realms of Gothic horror …

The figure of a man was silhouetted on the gradually paling sky.

Peabody switched his torch on again, but powerful though the Maglite was, the beam didn’t reach far enough. Whoever the guy was, he was about sixty yards away.

‘Hello?’ Peabody shouted, circling around the taped-off area. ‘Who are you, please?’ There was no response. The figure remained indistinct and motionless. ‘You need to clear this area. This is an official crime scene.’

The figure remained where it was.

Peabody was angry rather than alarmed. Primarily at himself. He’d stayed as sharp as he could, and he’d still let this creep sneak up on him. Not only that, he’d told him to get his arse out, and the guy wasn’t moving. Did he carry such little authority?

‘PC Peabody!’ he said, tromping uphill, his heavy feet crunching the trash.

The figure still didn’t move, though now the torch was picking him out. Peabody saw a grey suit, a white shirt, a green tie, dark hair – and a weirdly marked face.

‘What the . . .?’ Peabody breathed. And then he smiled to himself.

This was a wind-up of some sort.

Back when he’d been a probie, he’d been subject to all kinds of mickey-taking, as they all were, of course. There was never a trick too nasty or scary for older coppers to play on younger ones, or that they didn’t find hilariously funny afterwards. He’d hoped all that was past him now, but apparently not. Except that he’d be surprised if anyone found this situation amusing, and the higher up the slope he ascended, the less amusing it seemed. Because the thinner and stiffer the watching figure seemed to be, the darker its eyes, the more weirdly streaked its face, and . . . the redder its mouth.

‘What the hell?’ Peabody said again, this time aloud.

For half a second, he had the horrific notion that a corpse had been propped up. But over the last two or three yards, he realised the truth.

It was a shop mannequin, its suit ragged and filthy, its white shirt not a shirt at all but the mannequin’s own polystyrene flesh, its tie a piece of fuzzy-felt, its hair a ratty wig, its face gruesomely plastered with women’s make-up.

Peabody halted a couple of feet below the static figure. He half-expected a sniggering copper to come out from behind it. But no one did. The only sound was the rustling and flapping of the forensics tent down in the dip. Cautiously, almost gingerly, he scrambled up the remaining distance until he was face to face with it. When he looked down, he saw that its feet were embedded amid broken, twisted branches.

Okay, so it hadn’t happened by accident; someone hadn’t just discarded this thing. No doubt there were dozens of such objects scattered across the landfill, but someone must have set this one up deliberately. And in the last half hour or so, because if there was one thing Peabody was certain about, it had not been here when they’d arrived during daylight …

Hopefully you like the sound of STOLEN. Well, as I say, it’s published on May 16. Two weeks from now …

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

  

TWILIGHT 
by William Gay (2007)

Outline

An open cart is wheeled into a small backwoods town. Not an unusual occurrence, you may think – except that this cart is carrying the bloodied, butchered remains of a family who were apparently murdered alongside each other out in the terrible and mysterious tract of overgrown wasteland called the Harrikin. Weirder still, there is a dead dog alongside the corpses, a dog wearing diamond studs in its pierced ears. The townsfolk are shocked, if at the same time a little blasé. Because this, it would seem, is the sort of thing that happens out in the twilight zone that is the Harrikin.

And this is the opening to Twilight, William Gay’s superb piece of back-country noir, a more than unsettling tale about amoral madness in the depths of the impoverished American South.

We’re in rural Tennessee in 1951, and two young people – Corrie Tyler, and her younger brother, Kenneth – are suspicious that well-to-do local undertaker, Fenton Breece, has cheated their family. On seeing the expensive casket purchased for their late bootlegger father being used elsewhere, they dig up his grave and discover the corpse of their parent not just entombed in a cheap box but sexually violated. Further investigations of other recent burials – in other words, more grave-robbing, performed secretly and by night – uncovers additional evidence that Breece is a fetishist and necrophile. But Breece is a leading citizen who no-one would think the worse of without hard evidence. Kenneth thus breaks into his house, seeking this out, and discovers, among other purloined and highly inappropriate possessions, a whole package of photographs depicting the well-groomed undertaker having sex with a variety of dead women – deceased citizens recently entrusted to him – all now dressed and made-up to look like glamour queens.

Uncertain about the loyalties of local law enforcement, the Tylers attempt to blackmail Breece, thinking that, if nothing else, they can at least escape to a better life. But Breece, who is influential at many levels locally, has already turned to hoodlum-for-hire, Granville Sutter, a skilled and callous killer, to retrieve the evidence. In the ensuing first clash between the vying parties, Corrie dies, and 

Tyler flees into the countryside, Sutter close behind.

Tyler is no expert at this sort of thing, whereas Sutter has done it several times at least. The youngster’s only option, or so it seems, is to head into the Harrikin, that vast and dreamy wilderness, trackless, tangled, littered with eerie buildings and rusted, overgrown machinery, and populated by the strangest, most reclusive people – witches, weirdoes, lost souls, forgotten families – all of whom are more than capable of impeding Tyler in his race against death, as well as in shielding and protecting him. It depends how the mood takes them, it depends on the worsening winter weather, it depends on a great many things beyond Tyler’s control, whether he lives and gains justice, or dies a lonely death and finishes up another plaything in Fenton Breece’s squalid funeral parlour vault …      

Review
There is considerable debate about how the ‘Southern Gothic’ school of literature can actually be defined, though most advocates of the genre would agree that it originated in the American South, having emerged from the chaos and poverty following the defeat of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and that as such it weaves dark, macabre tales about the damaged human condition with bizarre, often grotesque imagery (much of this concerned with waste, decay and violence), and yet, though often Noirish in tone, tends to lean away from the traditional mystery-thriller into the realms of magic realism, where we’re living in a recognisable world but such is the madness and strangeness of it all that an unearthly atmosphere pervades.

However, to indicate how broad a church this is, countless authors are named as practitioners, some of whom, at first glance at least, seem poles apart from each other.

Joe R Lansdale and Harper Lee? Cormac McCarthy and Tennesee Williams?

But there is one thing that firmly unites them. All are supreme wordsmiths, who write richly and lovingly about their native Deep South. Not always approvingly, often damningly, but always colourfully, evocatively and intriguingly.

Very much at home in this diverse but hyper-talented crowd is the late, great William Gay, who sits firmly at the darker end of what is already a pretty dark spectrum – his work usually characterised by ordinary, everyday folk facing desperate moral dilemmas thanks to frightening encounters with evil – with Twilight among the very darkest of his endeavours. 

To start with, it’s exquisitely written. It almost seems like a contradiction in terms when we’re talking about murder and necrophilia and an horrendous journey through a jungle of twisted vegetation and skeletal industrial ruins, but William Gay goes at it in his customary poetic fashion, describing it lusciously and hitting us with one startling visual after another. Never let it be said that beauty can’t be found in waste and decay. Again it seems like a paradox, but we’re almost in the realm of fairy tales, The Wizard of Oz invoked at the same time as The Blair Witch Project, every Germanic woodland fable you can think of (we even have the brother and sister heroes pursued by an ogre!) sitting side-by-side with modern tales of perversion, crime and ruin.

And yet, William Gay does it all with a smile on his face. Though he has much to say about outcasts, loners, the lost and disenfranchised, those who’ve fallen through the cracks even in a depressed economy like rural Tennessee in the early ’50s, and though he is patently disgusted that life is still cheap some fifty years after the Wild West has ended, and sickened by small-town corruption and selfishness, his touch is light. He gives us plenty of laughs along with the screams.

As usual though, none of this would work without characters we quickly get involved with.

Kenny Tyler starts out as the archetypical uneducated country-boy, but inevitably grows in stature during his fight for life out in the world-apart that is the Harrikin, hatching both wisdom and courage, and so giving us a coming-of-age vibe along with everything else.

Fenton Breece, meanwhile, represents a quintessential villain of the Old South, being a snake oil salesman of the most blatant kind, charming, civilised and plausible, all of which nevertheless conceals a truly degenerate soul. The moment he confesses to Granville Sutter that he killed a woman once, and may even – though he doesn’t totally remember it – have killed other women, is quite 

chilling in its shrugged-off matter-of-factness.

Sutter, though a blunt instrument in comparison, is equally complex, because while Breece is rotten to the core, Sutter has no core at all – at least, none that is recognisably human. He initially appears as a typical town bully, another violent brute where women are concerned, but also a confident disposer of men. So, he’s a boor, yes, but he’s also an out-and-out predator, who’s not just good at what he does because he has a streak of innate cunning that goes a mile deep, but because nothing matters to him. He simply doesn’t care about anyone and was probably born with this deficiency; the way some may come into this world lacking an arm or leg, Granville Sutter did so lacking conscience and charity. A madman, then, a psychopath – but as I’ve already said, and as we see through his dreams and reminiscences, a complex one too.

So how do I sum this novel up quickly? Well, in truth, you can’t.

Suffice to say that Twilight is an engrossing, elegiac study of the human darkness at the heart of what once might have been thought chocolate box America. Be warned, it’s not one of those garish hillbilly horror stories, but there is horror here along with humour and intellect, all of it wrapped up in sumptuous southern prose.

So, horror fans … read it. Thriller fans … read it. Literary fiction aficionados … read it. And surrealists and fabulists … you must read it too. This is Southern Gothic at its most haunting.   

Twilight hasn’t, to my knowledge, been adapted for film or TV just yet, and so I’m going to do my usual thing and stick my oar in early, advising any potential movie company who they should be casting when they finally get around to putting this great piece of work on film. Just a bit of fun, of course (like they’d listen to me in real life).

Kenneth Tyler – Ansel Elgort (probably a little older than he is in the book, though not by much)

Fenton Breece – Domhnall Gleeson

Granville Sutter – Michael Chiklis