"Cold, damp, nothing zones":
the mean streets of the Midlands
A review of: Ray Banks, The Big Blind (PointBlank Press, 2004)
and John Dalton, The Concrete Sea (Tindal Street Press, 2005)
"Now my problem is disposal. The area's in a state of arrested development, which means there are a load of half-demolished buildings dotting the landscape. Trouble is they're mostly either boarded up or surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence. I get to wondering what the fuck people are going to steal from a pile of rubble, but then they'd steal the steam off your piss round these parts." (The Big Blind)
In the opening chapters of The Big Blind, the rain comes down in sheets as the narrator struggles to dispose of the repellent, water-logged corpse of the black dog he has run over. As throughout the novel, the problem that weighs on Alan Slater is how to dispose of messy realities, and here as elsewhere a desolate, crumbling urban landscape conspires against him, hemming him in, thwarting at every turn his dreams of escape. 'Dump the job, dump the Beale, get the girl and live happily ever after' - the dreams of fulfillment seem hopelessly remote, given the oppressive reality of the disposal problems.
Both of the novels reviewed here - Ray Banks' The Big Blind and John Dalton's The Concrete Sea - submerge their hapless protagonists in the grubby realities of Midlands cities. The rain-soaked streets and dark haunts of Banks' Manchester and Dalton's Birmingham are at the same time solidly real and strongly metaphoric. They are, in Dalton's phrase, "cold, damp, nothing zones", mapping the dark places of the human mind. Raymond Chandler, setting out (in The Simple Art of Murder) the agenda for the hard-boiled revolution in crime writing stressed the overriding importance of scene. From the outset it has been a tradition in which people for whom violence is "right down their street" play out their struggles in sharply delineated cityscapes - the alleyways into which Hammett "dropped" the detective story. Though hard-boiled fiction is by no means invariably urban, it is the big city that most regularly threatens a protagonist’s sense of a discrete self, his powers of understanding and his physical safety, and this emphasis on the disturbing creation of the urban scene remains one of the key elements in the American tradition.
Contemporary British noir - 'Brit grit' or 'British dirty realism' - evokes at its best a sense of place as intensely imagined as the mean streets of the American tradition. Banks' Manchester, with its derelict, littered canal sides, its grey tower blocks and sleazy casinos, is "a hotch-potch of creeds and criminals" - and of non-criminals who can all too easily find themselves in over their drink-befuddled heads. By his own account, the seedy details of this milieu were drawn from Ray Banks' earlier experiences: he had himself struggled to sell double glazing ("My patter was awful, my conscience too well-developed to make it a vocation, but I picked up enough lingo to avoid the sack") and had worked as a croupier in Salford, a couple of years that gave him first-hand knowledge of the dingy reality of British casinos: "In truth, these places weren't as bad as I've painted them, but to me it was like some new circle of hell after a while." (Ray Banks, "Writing The Big Blind").
The relationships within this circle of hell are sharply drawn. Alan Slater, steady drinker and doggedly loyal friend, is shackled to "a shitty little job" and "an overbearing manchild", Les Beale, a fellow double-glazing salesman, a "miserable sod" who is a reeling disaster area, "slobbering, stinking of sweat and alcohol". By turns violent and abject, Beale is so repellant and isolated that all he has is his job and his demanding, desperate attachment to Alan: Beale "didn't have a life outside of me and work. Even his silhouette looked lonely."
One of the great strengths of The Big Blind is Banks' appallingly convincing depiction of a relationship that maintains its disastrous grip on the protagonist against all the persuasions of reason and experience. Beale demands that Alan be at his beck and call, not just to drive him but to watch him play poker, to be his cheerleader, to be his back-up: to "clean up after him as best you can. That's my job. In this fucked-up situation we call a friendship." Although he knows perfectly well that the booze-sodden, insecure and irrationally aggressive Beale is "a pro at winding people up", Alan habitually falls into his allotted role as the friend who is "going to make everything better": "I'm still telling myself this is all fine,…If I can just keep cool and calm and collected, it'll be over soon enough."
As the novel's violent events gather momentum, we see the nature and the cost of the relationship with increasing clarity. Tears welling up, Beale looks more and more like "the fat kid made to do sports day"; Alan, struggling to extricate him from his troubles, finds it ever harder to avoid seeing the ironic relationship between good intentions and roads to hell. He always, he reflects, does "the decent thing, the only thing that seems right", but faith in his own innocence is rapidly crumbling. His head "cluttered" with everything that has gone wrong, he begins noticing things about himself that he normally keeps hidden in the same way that Beale hides his inner infant - things that make it difficult to keep reassuring himself that "I'm the good guy…I'm the one who…I'm the one who helps, cleans and nurtures that sodden sack of shit".
Banks sees his own writing very much in the context of the harshly realistic, distinctively local brands of contemporary British noir:
"I've always wondered how the British crime scene managed to become mired in police procedural and cosy. We're a dour country, rotten at the very core, but we don't seem to be able to get the pus out on the page, content to have shocking twists and neat conclusions. Writers like [Ken] Bruen, [Allan] Guthrie and Charlie Williams are trying to change that. Their characters aren't nice people, but they're infinitely more real than a dozen Wexfords…I want to read about the sick at heart, the dispossessed and those normal people who do something horribly wrong and have to pay the price for it." ("Writing The Big Blind")
It was in fact the Edinburgh crime novelist Allan Guthrie who commissioned The Big Blind (Banks' debut novel) for the American independent publisher, PointBlank, Guthrie's role as Acquisitions Editor having helped to make the imprint one of the most interesting new publishers of crime fiction. In the UK, one of the small independent presses that has come along in recent years to encourage the publication of fiction with a strong local flavour is the Birmingham-based Tindal Street Press, which has public funding to further its agenda of providing "a national and international platform for talented new writers from the English regions" (now expanding to other English regions from its original West Midlands base). Although crime fiction constitutes only a portion of the Tindal Street list, they have begun to bring out some impressive examples of contemporary urban noir - including, in addition to The Concrete Sea, John Dalton's debut novel, The City Trap (2002); "a noir showcase of unsettling stories", Dreams Never End, edited by Nicholas Royle (2004); Birmingham Noir: Urban Tales of Crime and Suspense (2002), edited by Joel Lane and Steve Bishop; and, also in 2002, David Fine's The Executioner's Art.
The Concrete Sea is set in the vividly realized (though unnamed) Birmingham, depicted by Dalton with surreal relish. Like Banks' Manchester this is an urban scene of desolation and decay. Dalton's plotting owes more to the detective novel, but his protagonist, Don Avoca, unquestionably belongs to the vulnerable, traumatized end of the private eye spectrum. His investigative efforts are akin to "walking through a nightmare"; the city he tries to navigate seems to contain nothing but "lives merging and repeating themselves infinitely", a sprawl that is meaningless except for the narratives people construct in their desperate efforts to make sense of things.
The novel's more conventional mystery plot involves a submerged horror: the body of a young student, Kate Connor, has lain undiscovered for over a year in a pit located on industrial wasteland. Working in co-operation with Jackie, a local PI, Don conducts an investigation that carries him towards possible explanations for the murder, towards treacherous villains given to murderous rages, and into grimy streets with their "desperate down-and-outs prowling, and hard thugs searching for a fight". Suspense is generated by Don's mounting fear and paranoia: "Unpleasant thoughts popped up out of nowhere: There's blood behind the door, Don, and someone wants to pay you back."
But, even more disturbingly, the investigation forces Don to confront his inner demons, and we, as readers, are compelled to share his experience of having "the past catch up inside your head". The wasteland where Kate's body lay hidden is a place that seems to Don "like a painful memory hidden deep in the landscape of his own mind", and he can't escape the recognition that the mysteries he's solving include the suppressed secrets of his own recent past, manifest in the conflicting voices that plague him: a deeply cynical, accusing, aggressive voice, "right inside your filthy mind", reminds him of all the worst capacities of his nature. This is partly the tough-guy detective's recognition that he becomes inseparable from the corruption he investigates ("You become part of the scene, you have to be as bad as the bad guys or you're screwed"), but the layered guilts lie deeper than this. For Don, the chaotic, malevolent urban scene merges with his private nightmares. The metaphor of the "concrete sea" suggests half-glimpsed monstrosities lurking in the unplumbed depths of the city as they do in the subconscious mind. Like Alan Slater, Don Avoca encounters aspects of himself that have been hidden away - misdeeds, traumas and losses uncovered in the process of "digging in the city for clues, digging in the city of my head".
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
