There Ain't No Justice - James Curtis

James Curtis turns his attentions to the world of boxing in this suitably hard-hitting 1937 novel, which tells the story of Tommy Mutch, a 'preliminary boy' from the slums of Notting Dale attempting to make a living in the fight game. It's pretty much the classic tale of the honest-but-none-too-bright boxer who finally discovers he's been sold out by his managers/promoters etc – but, as with all Curtis's work, the appeal lies less in the plot than in the telling. This typical passage shows his mastery of London vernacular:

“Blimey, Tom,” Fred was saying. “We di'nt half have a laugh tonight, Me and Reg takes a ball of chalk up to Notting Hill Gate and we picks up a couple of janes outside Woolworth's. Neither Reg nor me's got no lob to spare so we lumbers 'em into the Park. Laugh? You should have seen us. Reg says to his tart, right pusher she was and all, 'Do you take it?’ he says. Gawd, she di'nt half carry on. Thought she was going to jump straight down his throat.
“‘That's all right,’ says Reg, straightening his tie, you know the way he does, 'I meant sugar in your tea.’ Caw, laugh?”

Notting Dale is vividly depicted, and it's reasonable to assume Curtis know the area well (as usual, he's gratifyingly specific about his locations and, even though almost all the slum areas were cleared after the last war, one can still trace many of the journeys taken on foot by the characters*). And while it was notoriously rough, he shows it as a functioning community with family life, by and large, at the heart of it. Indeed, Mutch's own family aspire to a degree of respectability. But Curtis avoids sentimentalising or idealising working class life; the spectre of poverty is never far away, likewise some of the harsher realities of life on the bottom rung of society. Especially memorable in its grimness is a scene where Tommy has had to take his sister to a back-street abortionist's – although it ends with one of Curtis's most heartfelt passages:

He pressed her arm against his body. A current of sympathy passed from the one to the other. They were just a couple of kids from the slums. A few years back they ha d been playing hopscotch on the chalked pavements, and collecting pennies for the Guy, starting half way in October. It was a hell of a life, whichever way you looked at it.

As for Tommy Mutch, like all Curtis's main protagonists, he's essentially powerless. Kennedy in the Gilt Kid and Shorty Matthews in They Drive By Night seek to combat this by turning to crime, but their eventual defeat is inevitable. Mutch's skill with his fists in the short term might earn him a few extra quid (and a temporary place in the bed of flash promoter Arthur's 'piece', Dot), but he's not quick-witted enough to work out early on that he's been taken for a fool. And when he does finally realise, it's only through an orgy of violence against those who perpetrated it that he can gain a (temporary) sense of relief:

He drove him back with a series of pile-driving lefts and rights to the face. Arthur's guard was like paper. Every time Tommy struck, his fist connected with soft flesh which squelched and spurted blood beneath his hammer blows. Arthur fell to the floor. Tommy jumped on his face and ground an iron-shod heel on his nose. He could feel the bone crack. It was a happy feeling.
Now he was ready for the other two ponces. He'd give them a lesson. The bastards thought they could fight. They'd got another think coming. He sprang forward between them; the blood and mucus on his shoe heel made him slip; he fell to the ground; falling, his hands clutched one of his adversaries, his fingers fastening and twisting round his vitals.
The two lay locked on the floor. Tommy bit the other guy savagely in the throat. It tasted kind of salt. Dot was sobbing. This was a lovely fight, she'd never seen a better.

It's hard reading the above to imagine smiley Jimmy Hanley doing the stomping and biting; nonetheless it was he who starred in the 1939 film version, directed by Pen Tennyson and co-scripted by Curtis himself. Inevitably, the story and dialogue is considerably softened, but in some ways the film feels closer to Curtis's world than the more celebrated film of They Drive By Night (although the latter is probably the better movie). To see for yourself, a DVD release is apparently imminent, and there is also a showing at the NFT on May 20th. It's definitely worth a look.
As for getting hold of the book itself, there doesn't seem to be a reissue planned in the foreseeable future, but there were a couple of paperback editions in the 50s and these might yet be tracked down for not too extortionate a sum.

* Interestingly, some of the old houses on Wilsham Street, where Tommy and his family live, still survive – looking decidedly un-slumlike these days…

500 Essential Cult Books

This very promising-looking tome is being published in June, and includes entries on James Curtis, Patrick Hamilton and doubtless other writers relevant to this blog (along with plenty more good stuff). In the meantime, there's a related Facebook page. Go see.

The Passing Of Evil - Mark McShane/The Finsbury Lot - George Burnett

OK, after an unexpectedly protracted period waiting to move house and then waiting to get back online, I'm back with these two recently acquired early-60s tales of unswinging London. The McShane book (he was best-known for Seance On A Wet Afternoon) in particular has to rank as one of the dingiest novels I've ever read; that's by no means to its detriment, although I'd say neither effort is deserving of a dedicated post. Those Pan covers are irresistible, though – and both novels seem (to my mind) to evoke a very specific postwar period: post-Austerity but predating the social upheavals of the 60s; a time when many people, despite being told they'd 'never had it so good' were, on the evidence of such works as these, becoming all-too aware of just what it was they didn't have. It feels like the fag end of an era.
The Passing Of Evil (1961) is set in an unspecified area south of the river and introduces us to Gelina, an amoral female who gets her kicks from manipulating men (even with no tangible benefit to herself) and who turns up here – for no apparent reason – and turns her attentions to, variously, a shy, gauche appliance salesman (who lives with his mother), a small-time boxer, a pathetic would-be gangster and an even more pathetic businessman-cum-boxing promoter who dreams of living out his days on a Greek island.
The action (such as it is), is played out in joyless dancehalls, fly-blown cafés and depressing little shops. This is not a novel to evoke nostalgia (which could in retrospect be its main strength). Certainly the central character of Gelina is scarcely believable on any level and is bordering on misogynist; her motivation is never explained - any more than why she chooses this particular collection of losers to prey on. It all happens over a period of scarcely more than 24 hours; indeed, the heroically slow progress of the narrative and the generally run-down ambience makes this a veritable study in moribundia.

The Finsbury Lot (1963), is verging about as near to the straight crime thriller as I like to venture, and includes the stock bland police types, etc, although Burnett seems to be more interested in the world of the criminals and 'ordinary' types whose desperation is such that they find themselves on its fringes. The latter type is exemplified here by Frank Dolby, who, after a win on the pools, has moved from Dagenham to pursue his dream (and who wouldn't?) of opening a run-down sweet shop/tobacconist's on a back street in EC2. Needless to say, the business is soon struggling, and he finds himself unable to buy into to the brave new world of consumer durables to which his wife aspires. The chance of an easy few quid brings him into the orbit of the titular Finsbury Lot, whose racket is hijacking lorries carrying cigarettes (the gang members use words like 'perishing'). Things are further complicated after one of the 'Lot' deliberately and fatally drives a lorry over the policeman boyfriend of Dolby's sister-in-law (after whom Dolby himself secretly and fruitlessly lusts)… It all ends up more or less miserably.

A brief hiatus

I'll be taking a break from posting for a couple of weeks while I move house, but I'll be back with much, much more. In the meantime, be sure to listen to Lost Steps on Resonance. And by way of a change, here's a film recommendation: Anold Miller's fantastic 1965 Mondo doc Primitive London (reissued last year by the BFI's increasingly promising-looking Flipside series in a great-looking print). Truly a memento of Lost London - and with its weird mix of staged scenes, apparently 'real' interviews with 'beatniks', oddly disconcerting diversions (including a very short piece on bowling followed by a vet giving an injection to a goldfish), and, of course, plenty of necessary-to-the-plot footage of strippers, exotic dancers etc - a disarmingly surreal one. Oh, and a wonderful soundtrack - including much of the (presumably non-diegetic) strip club music - by Basil Kirchin, reminiscent of his Abstractions Of The Industrial North.

'The best London novel'

Over at the very excellent Londonist they've just run a poll on what's the best London novel. Annoyingly, I saw this just too late to make my vote count (let alone to direct any passing traffic from this site). So, anyway… it was won by something called The Borribles, of which I'd never heard (not that I'm making a virtue of ignorance - it may genuinely be very good. Even if it is a fantasy book for kids.). Apparently this was the result of an especially zealous Twitter campaign - which perhaps is revealing in itself. However, it's good to see two Patrick Hamilton books (Hangover Square and 20,000 Streets…) among the top five.

Looking at the total votes cast though, it's interesting how little consensus there is, with only six books gaining more than 10 votes, and the vast majority with just one. And NONE of the books I've discussed on this blog so far received a single vote – something I find not totally displeasing. But I'd like to think a year or two down the line at least a few people might have been inspired to read, and would even be moved to vote for, one of these unjustly neglected works…

They Drive By Night by James Curtis

Along with The Gilt Kid, this is probably Curtis's best-known book (which isn't saying much), largely due to the 1938 film version – the same year the novel was published. Newly released from Pentonville prison, petty criminal Shorty Mathews calls on his girlfriend in Drummond Street only to find her strangled. Fearing he'll be no. 1 suspect, he goes on the run, hitching a lift with a lorry driver heading up the great north road. While the real culprit – a serial killer who preys on prostitutes and calls himself the Lone-Wolf – stalks the West End in search of victims, and the police – more mindful of their own career prospects than finding the right man – pursue various false leads, Shorty finds himself in the world of long-distance lorry drivers, transport cafes and 'lorry girls' - one of whom turns out to be an old flame…

Curtis uses this to explore his pet themes: the 'honest' criminal, and the stupidity and brutality of the police (there are some crowd-pleasing scenes where Shorty bashes some coppers while trying to evade capture), with plenty of top-notch slang – references to “galloping your antelope“; “a push in the truck“ (nothing to do with lorries…) and the like abound. In addition, the depiction of the serial killer Hoover is both believable and disturbing. Curtis apparently spent some time with lorry drivers researching his subject, and this further adds to the verisimilitude of the setting, with some revealing snippets of dialogue, such as this, in which an older driver recalls the glory days of the 1920s:

“You know what started it all? You see, when road transport first started there was none of these big firms. Most firms didn't have no more than four or five lorries and the guv'nor or his son was usually a driver and all. Any road, he was a working chap same as the others. Then the railway companies suddenly turned round and said: ' Blimey, why should the transport blokes come cutting into our trade like this?' so they bloody well start having lorries of their own and all. Well, it ain't fair their big organisation against the little blokes, so that's where all our troubles started.”
“Ar,” said Alf, nodding his big head.
“But it's all big firms nowadays,” the Leyland driver continued. “Bouts, Faircloughs, London Scottish, Aberdonian Transit, Glossops, Fisher Renwicks, they're all just the same as the railways.”
“But there's plenty of independents left. Blokes working on their own and all,” said Bill. “Bags of them.”
“Yerce, but every year there's less and bloody less. No, the road isn't what it was. When I first started driving, a bloke never knew how far he's go in a day. He just bloody well drove on till his bloody eyes was falling out of his head and then he had a kip in his wagon. You dursn't do that nowadays. I've heard of drivers getting blistered for that. 'Having a mechanically propelled vehicle not under proper control.’ That's what they get you for.”
He paused to hold a match to his cigarette that was bobbing, unlighted, between his lips.
“Bloody fortunes that've been made out of the road and all. I know blokes that started as drivers and ended up managing directors.”
He blew out a cloud of smoke. “And the tarts, now. Take the road-girls. Prostitutes, that's all they are now, what's left of them. When I first started there was lots of girls went on the road just for the fun of it. Decent brought up girls, servants, factory-tarts and all that. Not the riff-raff you find now. You'd see them at a week-end sitting in bloody droves along the fences and all you had to do was take your choice. They'd take a ride south on a Saturday, and then go north on the Sunday and be back at work on Monday morning just as if nothing had happened.”
He paused, then added as an afterthought:
“Didn't want no money for it neither. Most of them.”
“Caw,” said Bill. “Bin nothing like it in my time.”
“Course there ain't.” He nipped his cigarette and put it behind his ear. “You youngsters don't know what driving is. I've drove practically everything in my time, steamers, fourgons, all that caper. Plenty of work, plenty of money and plenty of fun. That's what it was like in the old days.”
He chuckled.
“Blimey, the things I've seen in some of the caffs, particularly on the Cardiff road. Make your hair curl and I ain't a-kidding to you neither. Fights and girls and Gawd knows what. I've known blokes playing nap with a tart for the kitty and she sitting on the table strip-naked. I was sitting in on that game and all, but I didn't make out. No, it was a bloke driving a furniture van that copped that time. It was the girls spoiled the bloody road in the end. Them and the big companies. When those old cows started to come for rides things got different and with copping a packet, well you got to do something about it. But them days I'm talking about all the girls was out for was just a lark and if you wore a lorry driver's hat you was a little tin God and in some of those caffs on the Great West you used to see blokes and tarts in evening dress and furs and all that madam eating bacon sandwiches along with the boys.”

They Drive By Night was reissued in 2009 by London Books. The film, which was directed by Derek Twist and stars Emlyn Williams as Shorty and the always-fabulous Ernest Thesiger as Hoover, inevitably softens the book, but Curtis himself wrote the screenplay and it's a great piece of early British noir with some especially good scenes in the lorry-drivers' milieu. Sadly it's not currently available on DVD, but it has been shown on Channel 4 in recent years, and I imagine a release isn't out of the question. (Interestingly, the 1939 film of Curtis's There Ain't No Justice is apparently due to be reissued on DVD sometime in 2010 - of which more when I talk about the book here…).

Wide Boys Never Work by Robert Westerby

Young Jim Bankley gets the sack from his dead-end car factory job in an unidentified Northern town and decides to try his luck in the more vibrant world of the capital. It might sound like the ingredients for a classic Angry Young Man novel, but this is 1937, the social changes of the 60s are a generation away and Jim's journey into the 'wide' world presents, ultimately, nothing more than a series of dead ends. But what a journey it is! This, along with James Curtis's work and Gerald Kersh's Night And The City, is one of the key London low-life novels of the 1930s.
Having made the acquaintance of some members of a London greyhound racing gang in his hometown, the thuggish young Jim is inducted into their world initially through a job in the used-car trade, and we're treated in passing to a priceless – and tellingly familiar – description of his fellow salesmen:

“These young men were not a kind he was used to. Loud-mouthed young rascals with oil-slicked hair, loose-lipped and prone to spots, they were astonishingly of a type until you realised they were trying to be. Check sports coats and grey trousers, or even lounge-suited, they had always two characteristics in common – and Old School Tie and a drawling voice which hardly sounded Cockney at all. Highly polished shoes and vaguely polished manners, a persuasive and inexhaustible flow of technical slang appertaining to 'buses', 'revs', 'con-rods,' 'remote-control boxes'; an astonishingly vacant mind, a small intellect contrasting with a shrewd eye for a customer – these seemed to be their hallmark. Their interests outside their work seemed kin as well. And at Swings the sole topics of idle conversation were vague references to sport (with some sort of unstated notion that 'Rugger' was somehow a more socially desirable game than 'Soccer', and an almost passionate interest in sex. Hour after hour, day after day, they were always ready to stand about in little groups and discuss the 'crumpet' of the night before. It seemed to Jim that the moment they could get away from work they would shoot off in their rickety motors to Hampstead Heath or Wimbledon Common, looking for Girls. Social misfits, for the most part, utterly incapable of managing any job other than the one they were in, they perpetual appetite for 'crumpet' with Girls was the most definite thing about them. 'Crumpet' – and Beer. 'Grend Stahff – Beeah!'”

The rest of the book charts Jim's transformation into a true wide boy, his rise (and inevitable fall) in the ranks of the Franks gang, and adventures in a world of greyhound racing, seedy clubs and dodgy boxing matches. His friend and mentor, Louie Franks, is gay – a fact that's treated in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way; equally surprising is the possibly equivocal nature of Jim's own sexuality: while he professes an interest in girls, there are several suggestions that his true proclivities lie elsewhere. He savagely beats another gay character who makes a pass at him, but only after the latter has been warned by Louie 'Don't rush him', and there's more than a hint of the homoerotic in Jim's relationship in another thuggish gang member, Mick.

While treading similar ground to James Curtis, Wide Boys differs from much of his work by presenting a moral centre in the form of Jim's father, who attempts to make him revert from the wide to the straight and narrow. Westerby himself also interjects remarks at regular intervals reminding us how young Jim is bound to come to no good end - a temptation to which Curtis never falls prey. But it's a minor carp - the novel, in its language and setting, feels authentic, and presents a terrific panorama of underworld London. Long unavailable, it was recently republished by London Books and is a must-read.

In this last choice extract – worth quoting in full – Westerby draws a picture of 'the Club' - and check out his final, revealing remark…

“A narrow door jammed between two shops; a dim passage; worn drown linoleum; two short flights of stairs covered with cheap cord carpet; the wall at the half-way landing badly marked by the passage of innumerable drunks; another door; and then the Club. Three large rooms; in the first, a dozen tables where silent men sat playing cards with their hats on. On the wall beyond them is a green baize noticeboard. In the middle of this is a printed card about betting slips. The card is dirty, and in one corner of it someone has made an obscene drawing in indelible pencil. The rest of the noticeboard holds strips giving the racing results of the afternoon, names and prices, written in board-school copper-plate, and pinned up every hour by a pimply youth in a skin-tight black suit. The youth's name is Perce, and he looks as if it would be. His face is the colour of a dirty plate, and no one has ever seen him without a half-smoked cigarette drooping from his mouth.
The second room is noisy. there are pin-tables, and a few chairs; a table with some newspapers on it – until they are either stolen or so rumpled as to be unreadable. This room is always full, and it is here the trouble occurs, when it occurs. The man in charge is called Ham. He is big and fat, squints and has a cauliflower ear. And he smells like acetylene. No one ever remarks on his peculiarities, unless drunk, in which case the remark is only made once. In 1935 Ham did a stretch for throwing two men out of a window.
The third room is larger still, with bare polished boards and a piano. This piano, and a saxophone, which is played by a talented but consumptive Jewish boy, provides the music for the dancing. Music starts at seven o'clock and goes on, with intervals, until two. There are a few tables and chairs around the walls, and at one end of the room another door leads out to a passage which leads to another door, which opens on to the stairs again. This has great strategic uses. You can follow someone into the Club, and think you have him covered, and then find you haven't. The tarts use this door, too, for their unobtrusive entrances and exits.
A few queer gentlemen come here to dance with one another, or with other young men who are willing to assume the mantle of perversion for the evening and a consideration.
The rest of the mob consists of tarts, touts, ponces, louts, bookies, ex-pugs, petty-gangsters, perhaps a stray newspaper-reporter trying to feel tough and Metropolitan, and a few fools, like me.”