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Fresh Blood 2
Edited by Mike Ripley & Maxim Jakubowski
The Do-Not Press, paperback, 208 pages, £8.00
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

A second wave of the Second Wave of Brit-crime. Or not. These are crime stories 'in that various criminal acts are depicted'. Some of them are, unfortunately, best avoided. 

None, though – not one – comes anywhere near Phil Lovesey’s gruesomely smug ‘Stranglehold’. His introduction, all Chelmsford and/or regular bowel movements, should be warning enough, but the thankfully short story itself is a misogynist tirade masquerading as hip and flip. It reads just like the bowel movement of a man on the particularly sharp end of a possibly bitter divorce. He should be ashamed.

Better by far are Charles Higson, RD Wingfield, John Baker and Mike Ripley. Ken Bruen’s likeably pessimistic piece, like the best here, is more concerned with substance than plot. It’s no coincidence that these are the ones least driven by some tortured twist or narrative turn. John L Williams’ ‘The North Star’ is a bleak portrait of prostitution in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay that retains the seedy lightness of his fine Faithless novel, while Maxim Jakubowski gifts us a typically explicit existential black comedy about stripping, contract killing and book collecting. Iain Sinclair captures the crown with ‘No More Yoga of the Night Club’, a dizzying evocation of East End gangsterism, marred only by it’s being a reprint from the Michael Moorcock edited and published New Worlds 221 (Winter, 1996).