And it’s probably just as well, because Williams’ city is surely one of the UK’s less salubrious addresses. His characters are largely half-caste, most of them firmly rooted in deals from shady through downright illegal. Like Kenny Ibadulla - ‘cunt that he was’ - a former rugby prodigy who owns his own nightclub but is branching out with the city’s only Nation of Islam mosque. Or Mikey, in whose slippery fingers shoplifting has become a veritable artform. Or like Tony, who is just out after a year and it wasn’t even him carrying the damn gun. Replica gun.

Williams brings all of this - all of these - vividly to life, interleaving business, criminal (robbery, prostitution, drugs) and sexual histories with considerable skill. That’s not the problem. (The Bill Burroughs racing tips are a nice touch.) And some stories are stronger than others, inevitably. Darker ones like ‘The North Star’ (originally for Fresh Blood 2) and the lengthy revenger ‘The Casablanca’, are offset by the short, punchy, semi-comic likes of ‘Black Caesar’s’ (Kennedy’s ramshackle embracing of the Black Muslims), ‘The Glastonbury Arms’ (half-hearted terrorism from Cardiff’s White Panther faction) and the best - ‘The Ship and Pilot’ - the wayward tale of the city’s first pirate radio station.

No, the problem’s in the book’s structure. Williams has opted to go A to B, making our progress more mundane than it needs. All he had do was rearrange the eight pieces, mess-up his over-strict chronology a bit, make our time with him less soap-opera, more - inevitably - Pulp Fiction. Still, there’s nothing stopping you from reading Five Pubs, Two Bars and A Nightclub in any order you like, so my advice is do a little work, be adventurous and start at the end. It’ll repay the effort.