" Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?" or the Watchmen and me...

I grew up in Easterhouse but I went to a "selective" school; what my English cousins would call a grammar school. The story of how I got there was based on a "fix". The guy who was "Third" in the class (academically) had parents who knew the "right people"and had managed to wrangle him a place at St. Mungo's Academy. Driven by some sense of justice our teacher sent for my parents and let them know about this, off the record. The end result was that I managed to ride the wave in along with the fixee. All rather dodgy, I'm afraid. Not to mention the fact that the guy who was "Second" really resented this. I can understand that but unfortunately, whenever we met in later years, he made it quite clear that he resented me more than he did the other guy, the one who had actually cheated him out of a place.

The bottom line is that I went to a school that was a 40 minute bus ride away and had to wear a uniform that marked me out as a stranger in my home district. I also learned Latin instead of "Technical Drawing" as part of the curriculum. Hence the pretentious title quote from the Roman poet Juvenal which, as everyone knows, translates roughly as : "Who watches the watchmen ?".

From previous posts you may have gotten the impression that Easterhouse could be rather tough at times. The role of the local Police must have been difficult. I've always said that despite "E-hoose's" reputation 90% of the people living there were law abiding and generally hard working. Unfortunately for the local cops at least 99% of the 90% didn't trust the Law. I think that's probably true in most working class communities. Politics lines the Police up with people who are more articulate, more vocal and better able to use them as a service.

There's a strange duality in the average working person's relationship with the Police. It's hard to trust them because you always fear, even when completely innocent, that they'll turn on you like a Kafka-esque Rottweiler. On the other hand, as pointed out by the great Ed McBain when explaining why he used policemen (not private investigators) as the heroes in his crime novels, who else do you call when there's been a murder ? I'm not too proud to admit that the first time I ever found myself on the sharp end of a mugging I shouted "Police!" at the top of my voice as I ran away.

I grew up during the height of the local gang warfare and saw local yobs knocking down picket fences and hammering nails through sticks. This was so that they wouldn't feel left out during the amnesty organised by Frankie Vaughn. Maybe the cops thought that they'd finally put an end to the notorious Fred Flintstone gang.(You should view the legendary Matt McGinn's song on you tube to get a perspective on that particular golden age.) Matt also sums up the trust the average Glaswegian places in "ra Polis" in his song "The 2 heided man". Not much. I also note that things really haven't changed too much according to the Evening Times.

TV cops had no effect on our perception of the genuine article. Good cops like George Dixon seemed about as real as Steve Zodiac. One series did provide a nickname for the group of plainclothed " officers assigned to deal with the gang problem. At the sight of a saloon car full of big, short-haired six-foot men turning the corner every urchin in the street would scatter shouting, "It's the Untouchables!".

Many events and incidents over the years have shaped my view of the who are the "good guys" or "bad guys". At 55 I've definitely gone the way of becoming more right wing with age. About 4 or 5 years ago I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Parks Department had planted 40 or so new sapling trees in Blairtummock Park up at the arse-end of Easterhouse 10 minutes' walk from my house.

Next day I walked up with my dog to find that maybe 5 or 6 of the trees had survived a vandal-fest of chopping and uprooting. I was already living with the fact that the local yobs had discovered that the yellow waste baskets strapped to lamp standards will burn like plastic torches for about an hour if you hold a lighter under them long enough for combustion to kick in. If you ever take a dog for a walk in the vicinity be prepared to carry the poop bag all the way home. (Oh, dear God! This is beginning to read like a letter to the "Daily Mail"!)

Policing seems to be different up there. Two incidents outlined that for me.

One New Year, when I still lived with my Father in a tenement flat, I went out to discover the ground floor apartment had every window smashed in ( bedroom and living room at the front, two bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom at the back). A bunch of teenage mentalists had been tanked up on alcohol and were battering one another on the stretch of grass in front of our block. A couple of cop cars drew to a halt. Safe in the parked vehicles the Polis watched them knock one another about and then pan in the windows ( one of the participants lived in the ground floor flat). The mother of the family had remonstrated with the cops about not offering any help. The sergeant on the scene rolled down his window and said"You know it'll be another 3 days before the council can do any repairs." Then the cars rolled off into the night. Another triumph for minimal intervention.

Some time later a few friends and I got invited to a small party in a semi-detached house in the West End of Glasgow. In a bunch we arrived about 11 o' clock and switched on a record .Before the first track had finished playing the local Police were at the door asking us to break up the party. No exaggeration. The neighbours must have had speed dial phones attached to the net curtains. This struck me as being an interesting illustration of Police tactics and priorities.

Part of me says, "That's life, move on and grow up" but I still resent the injustice of this and a few other brushes with the cops. Once a pair of plods tried to arrest a friend and me for sitting at the front of our tenement after they'd failed to catch any of the gang members they'd been chasing. The only thing that saved us was the righteous indignation of a wee woman neighbour from across the road. She had thrown her window open and put them bang to rights.

Another time a friend and I had been at a bachelor night party and were walking home. We became aware that we were being shadowed by a police car (subtle this wasn't).

Shaking hands we split up at the next junction. My friend headed down towards (relatively posh) Mount Vernon while I carried on up towards Barlanark and Easterhouse. Guess whom the police opted to follow ? When the car inevitably drew up beside me I managed not to say anything too stupid, or even worse, smart. One of the dynamic duo asked who I was and where I was going. I was sober and innocent so it was easy to handle but I was always aware that you never try to pat a Rotweiller. I didn't ask "Are you carrying the brain this evening , Orificer ?" Even writing about it now I still get a little frisson of resentment. And don't get me started on how the Police behaved during the miners' strike.

Still, who are you going to call if there's a murder..... ?

The Football Season, Sgt. Cribb. and forgotten bookshops.

So the Football season is well and truly under way once more. Like most of the popular sports of to-day Football has its roots in the Victorian era. That fact always reminds me of the wonderful "Sergeant Cribb" series of books written by Peter Lovesey.

Despite their very British background I first encountered these novels in American paperback editions with wonderfully evocative covers. I remember buying a copy of "The Detective wore silk drawers" and being instantly hooked by a fast-paced, humorous mystery story with a background of bare-knuckle boxing. This led me on to find "Wobble to death" which was Peter Lovesey's first novel and winner of the Macmillan / Panther prize. It was set against the background of an endurance race. The Victorian era was the fountainhead of all the great popular sports of the present day.

There used to be a wonderful, little used bookshop near the University, just off Hawkhill, in Dundee. It was owned by a Mr. Marshall and stocked an amazing amount of popular fiction. (I'll hold up my hand and admit that I spent too much time and money there. Ditto the late, lamented pub "The Scout" which stood only a few yards distant). I had always read Science Fiction but Marshall's opened my eyes to other genres.

I discovered that Westerns could be well written and imaginative. Early encounters with Louis L'Amour led me on to read John (B)Harvey ("Hart the Regulator"), Elmore Leonard, Ed Gorman and Loren D. Estleman. Just what is it with crime writers and the Western ?

I never really took to the work of J.T. Edson. The multiple series he wrote seemed to reflect the B westerns that were tacked on in cinemas as second features during the '50s and '60s. The Western authors whose works I most enjoyed all had a "big screen" quality either in setting or characters. Edson did however coin a memorable phrase when describing the "revisionist" Westerns that had surplanted those of the Golden Age. Many of the films being produced in the late '60s and early '70s were downright sleazy, particularly the stampede of low budget "spaghetti westerns" that drygulched Sergio Leone's superior product (and were resurrected by the '80s video boom). Edson dismissed this genre of film-making as"mud and rags ". Few film critics were as succinct, or as accurate.

The "Sergeant Cribb" books made me a faithful follower of Peter Lovesey's work. Can it really be nearly forty years? The author remains up there in my top 10 after all this time. I even had the pleasure of meeting him at a crime fiction "convention" in Nottingham and I can report that he absolutely lived up to my expectations. The "Peter Diamond" books get better with each new novel and the author's short story collections are full of little gems to be savoured. I recommend them, but savour them one at a time. As the title of one collection says, "Do not exceed the stated dose".

Things that go bump in the night.

After my last blogging session, about "Noir" fiction, and my mention of "Fallen Angel" I've been a bit haunted by an upcoming German language exam with the Open University. Haunted too by my claim that "'Angel" might be the ultimate "Noir" novel. On second thought, even though it
ticks so many of the genre boxes, I would have to admit that it does invoke a supernatural element that is the crux of the plot. Purists could rightly claim that this element would exclude it from the "Noir" umbrella. Taking it one step further it could even be argued that it isn't a detective story even though it sticks rigidly to the conventions of the genre.

Despite his personal enthusiasm for spiritualism Sir Arthur Conan Doyle laid down a rule about the use of supernatural in the classical detective story. Hence the often quoted words of Sherlock Holmes : "This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply".

The words may as well have been carved in stone. Monsignor Ronald Knox was later to incorporate this rule into his decalogue for the detective story. Still, there's something fascinating about crime stories which suggest elements of the supernatural.

I've already revealed that any time I happen to visit London I always try to make a "pilgrimage" to Baker Street. The depths of my sadness are even greater than that. A couple of years ago when I missed my flight back to Glasgow and opted to take an overnight coach home because I was working the following day I was cheered up by the fact that I found myself travelling along Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. I had never visited this part of London before but I'd known for many years that Thomas Carnacki ("The Ghost Finder") lived at number 427 on that very street. fortunately it was quite dark as the coach rolled on and I didn't get a chance to make a total arse of myself by trying to read the house numbers at a distance. Searching for houses that never really existed could be taken as a sign of extreme eccentricity.

(A few months back I was heartened to discover in a blog written by an American crime writer that the author had happened to be in the vicinity of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and felt the need to visit slip F-18 of the Bhia Mar marina. This, of course is the docking place of "The Busted Flush" and the eternal address of Travis McGee. I fully understood and would do the same. In fact, and I haven't told Anne as yet, if we do visit New York in the future I have two definite tourist attractions in mind. One is the "Mysterious Bookshop". The other is another fictional address. I am a sad man, but I know it.)

I recently bought the first volume of the old TV series "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes " through Amazon UK and was well pleased by the adaptation of the Carnacki story "The Horse of the Invisible". Usually the solution to the mystery posed in Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories is either supernatural or "mundane". This one twists the formula to allow for both. The cast was excellent and the production looked more lavish than I remembered.

The only slight disappointment for me was that Donald Pleasence, excellent actor though he was, didn't fit my mental picture of Carnacki. Reading the stories for the first time back in the mid-1970s I pictured Carnacki as looking like the late Roger Delgado. (Although he was most often cast as a villain he was an actor who always seemed to have a real sense of humour and humanity. Anything I've read about him since tends to confirm that sense.)

Strangely, I do picture Donald Pleasence whenever I read any of the stories in Edward D. Hoch's wonderful "Simon Ark" series. These also centred on crimes with an element of the supernatural involved but the solution is always firmly rooted in the rational. I once owned 2 or 3 American paperback collections of the early Ark stories but,sadly, no longer. When someone gets round to reprinting them I'll be first in line.

Shades of ultimate black.....

Having written a little about how the term "noir" is overused and over- extended I was pleased to find that Ed Gorman's excellent blog included links to an essay by Otto Penzler which nails that particular butterfly neatly to the wall. It articulates my thoughts so much better than my own attempt that even the title encapsulates a pretty good definition of the subject genre : "Noir fiction isn't about private eyes, it's about losers".

The bottom line is that "Noir" stories should carry a sense that the venal characters are always doomed."Falling Angel" by William Hjortsberg is probably the most brilliantly grim example of the ultimate in the genre. It climaxes not only in doom but literal damnation. Alan Parker filmed it as "Angel Heart" but didn't quite manage to capture the grimness and absolute isolation of the book's ending.

Noir or not ?

I know that I've mentioned my weakness for visiting Amazon UK when I've had a couple of beers. Despite knowing this I went to the site last weekend with 2 beers and a shot of Irish whiskey under my belt; just enough to loosen inhibitions and blur judgement, not enough for a wild spendfest. I had just watched the 2009 re-make of "The Taking of Pelham 123" and was obviously letting the film influence my consumerism.

I probably started looking for "heist" or "caper" novels but ended up buying several volumes (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Manhattan and Miami) from the Akashic Noir series. I already have the "London Noir" and "Paris Noir" anthologies edited by Maxim Jakubowski and have thoroughly enjoyed both. Akashic Publishing also have their own versions of Paris and London noir and I may sample them at a later date.

What gave me something to mull over was the sheer number of volumes the company have produced in the last few years. They have almost 40 in print with more on the way. Locations include "Wall Street", "Moscow", "Delhi", "Havana" and "Indian Country".
This makes me think two things. First of all that the Noir label is very marketable. Secondly, and this is purely subjective, the label "Noir" is now stretched far beyond the limits I would normally think of when trying to define it. The original Serie Noire novels from which critics coined the term were hugely influenced by American hardboiled crime fiction. I find it difficult to give a definition of exactly what I mean by noir fiction but some of these locations are stretching it a bit.

The label is also being used in comics at the moment.Marvel Comics have created their own pocket universe with "Noir" versions of several of their super-heroes. This is definitely out of bounds : "costumed cut-ups" as Stan Lee used to describe them have no place in noir fiction.

Ironically, DC comics, Marvel's biggest rival, has launched a "pulp" universe featuring a mixture of comic book charcters, notably Will Eisner's "Spirit" and the Batman, and major figures from the pulp magazines of the 1930s, Doc Savage and the Avenger (labelled as "Justice Inc." probably to avoid legal action since Marvel has several titles based on their super group the Avengers). Shady alleys, trenchcoats, fedoras, elevated railways, cars with running-boards: this ticks a lot more of my noir boxes than the X men ever will.

It's interesting to note that the writer Brian Azzarello, noted for specializing in crime comics, only took the job of creating a "pulpverse" because he was told he could exclude super-heroes. Cynics might give gentle cough and discreetly point to the gentleman in black and grey pyjamas with matching bat ears and scalloped cape but Batman isn't "super": he's only the world's greatest detective who's trained himself in science and martial arts. (I also suspect that he's included because DC couldn't get the rights to use "The Shadow". If they do then this group of comics will move even higher up my reading list).

(Aside : reading back the above it's rather obvious that I'm a DC rather than a Marvel "fan", though I do read titles from both publishers. To an outsider the distinction must be very hard to make. This dilemma is summed up perfectly in an episode of "The Simpsons".

Mrs. Krabappel is trying to let "Comic Book Guy" down gently as their relationship isn't working. She tries to say it in several ways before resorting to "I'm from the Marvel Universe, you're from DC".
"Ah!", he replies"I understand perfectly".
Definitely a joke for the comic fans in the audience.)

A final thought on why DC's "pulpverse" has more right to the adjective "Noir". The writer on "Justice Inc.", the back-up feature in "Doc Savage" is one Jason Starr.
I've encountered Mr. Starr, along with Ken Bruen, as the co-author of the most hilarious crime comedy series I've ever read. ("Bust", "The Slide" and "The Max"). come to think of it hilarity would normally exclude a novel from my definition of Noir. Time to go back to the drawing board...........