London Noir
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski
Serpent's Tail Mask Noir pbk, 264 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
This Maxim Jakubowski-edited collection is about "the darkness...at the heart of our contradictory city". The "noir" of the title implies that certain darkness, a certain violence, and is a promise well served. Death and violence sweep these pages like a Middle Ages plague; drugs, prostitution, the Piccadilly meat rack are all up for inspection. London always was a dark city, and without getting too political about it, since the demise of the GLC it's got a whole heap darker. For that, some stories in here are too much like reportage - yes, there are drugs, down and outs around every corner, and teenagers used/abused by unscrupulous men, but they don't necessarily make for good fiction: 'Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)', 'Angel's Day', 'Scouting for Boys'.
Better are those that paint the city in more abstract, surreal tones or push hard on the humour button. Like a good editor, Jakubowski includes not only himself but his bookshop (he is proprietor of the delightful Murder One), with the intriguing '71-73 Charing Cross Road', a curious, letter-bound affair between the writer and a mail-order customer in the States that turns from sweet to perverse to cool without ever two meeting. Liza Cody's contribution rebuilds the brutal death of a young girl through the thoughts of another teenager playing her in a TV reconstruction; complex and nightmarish, it's one of the anthology's real highlights. And in 'Brand New Dead', the uniquely self-publicising Derek Raymond offers in a handful of pages a far more ferocious, provocative exercise than he managed in his recent, quite exceptionally bad novel.
It's disappointing that very few of the authors in here seem sufficiently motivated to tackle London's rich ethnic mix (though Cody's 'Reconstruction' is one), and of those few that do Julian Rathbone's darkly comic 'Of Mice, Men and Two Women' stands out. In it, an Asian woman embarks on an energetic affair with a young "Afro stud" under the eyes of her lentil-loving liberal middle-class neighbours. Rathbone's willingness to play with racial stereotypes without fear or favour is, like the serious bad taste he serves up with it, a delight.
This is a crime anthology, and crime, like horror, is a flexible definition, which may go to explain both Christopher Fowler's 'Perfect Casting' and Liz Holliday's 'And She Laughed'. Of the two, it's Holliday's paranoia about a peeping neighbour that wins out over Fowler's rather obvious tale of a self-regarding actor's apparent big break. But both are representative in their way of the book's main flaw, the comparative inability of these writers to convince us that this is a book about London. As with the recent Time Out sponsored book of short stories, very little here is actually about the city itself, preferring to just toss in the occasional street name or two. What this collection lacks is a story like Charles Higson's marvellous 'The Red Line' in that earlier book, with its description of a death brilliantly articulated through the London Tube system.
Indeed, it would have been nice to see the fast-rising Higson in these pages, alongside maybe Mike Philips (whose books successfully invoke the smells and confusions of London), or even the doyen Barbara Vine (think of the Tube-centred King Solomon's Carpet). Certainly she would've been at home here amongst the (welcome) preponderance of women. London Noir: flawed certainly, but worth helping with its enquiries.