…due to work commitments Loitering With Intent will be closed for the foreseeable…

One my favourite things about twitter, besides the cute puppy photos and hardcore sweariness, is finding criminally overlooked books which Waterstones are too prickish to keep in stock.  Sean Cregan’s All You Leave Behind is one of them.

Chase is a runner, making high risk deliveries into The Levels, a slum no reputable company will enter, and he knows his game; blend in, move fast, never, ever open the package.  Which is doable, until a package starts ringing.  Inside is a gun and a woman’s voice at the other end of the phone telling him he was being set-up as an unwitting suicide bomber for the recipient.  She’s saved his life but the job still needs doing.

Chase isn’t the kind of man to go blowing holes in strangers for the hell of it though and as he begins to pick up hints about the mystery woman’s identity he gets dragged deeper into The Levels fractured geography of burned out lots and ambush-friendly rat-runs.  Is she a vigilante or a guardian angel?  With the package’s original senders after him to finish the job and his family under threat as a turf war rages Chase needs her to be the latter.

The denouement is driven forward at a tremendous pace, an orgy of cinematic violence which is ultimately very satisfying.

It’s impossible to read All You Leave Behind without thinking of William Gibson’s Sprawl novels, the architecture is the same, all slow decay and Darwinian solutions, and Cregan has a fantastic eye for location.  The Levels slum is an accelerated version of any western world sink estate you could think of, thriving but precarious and given a light cyberpunk gloss.  As in Gibson’s later novels the familiarity is nicely disconcerting, we know this place but we probably aren’t equipped to survive in it, which is a problem because it’s coming closer all the time.

This is an impressively sleek novella, written in stripped down prose with not a word out of place.  The characters are well drawn, the plotting pacy, and Cregan creates such a pervasive atmosphere that you can almost taste the smell of dead junky.

All You Leave Behind by Sean Cregan is available now.

The first volume of Edward Grainger’s Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories was one of the books of 2011 for me so when I heard he was graciously turning over his carefully crafted, and obviously well-loved, characters to another writer I was pretty surprised. It’s a bold move, one which most writers are far too territorial to consider – respectful touch of the hat brim to Mr Grainger. As an experiment it stands or falls on the ability of the author and Grainger has made a fine choice in Heath Lowrance, an established cult writer with his own weird western series in the offing from Trestle Press.
Miles to Little Ridge is a brisk, action-packed novella following African-American US Marshall Gideon Miles as he attempts to bring a suspect in for trial. The man, Gantry, is a reformed character when we meet him, eeking out a living and a trying to bring up his young daughter on a few acres of dusty scrub; nothing like the bad guy you expect. The actual bad guys are neatly subverted too, small time lowlifes whose relationship is underscored with an intriguing homoerotic frisson.
This is a strongly written novella and fans of the earlier Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories will find it fits perfectly into the cannon. Lowrance plays on Grainger’s pitch – it’s the same, raw, hard world, suffused with brutality and prejudice – and he respects the rules of the game, but reading Miles to Little Ridge is like watching a new manager take over a team you know well and guide them to a win using his own tactics.
It’s going to be interesting seeing where Grainger takes the series from here – you feel that after making the leap this can’t possibly be a standalone – and with the wealth of talent in the western genre right now he won’t be short on potential contributors.

Luca Veste has become something of a Renaissance Man lately; scholar, author, patron of fledgling bloggers, and in November he added charity campaigner to his repertoire, editing Off The Record, an outstanding collection of transatlantic crime fiction to benefit two very worthy child literacy charities.

So far the reviews have been excellent and the sales encouraging but Luca is a shameless pimp when charity’s involved, so he’s pulled on his floor length white mink and cherry red fedora to hawk Off The Record here today.

Taking on a charity anthology with no previous experience was a bit insane, what possessed you?

Idiocy and Jack Daniels. Like all people who drink, I overestimated my ability to do something well.

Why children’s literacy? Don’t you care about cancer or crippled kittens?

There’re tons of cancer charities, you can’t move for them. They get enough money, or so someone told me anyway. And kittens can fuck right off, horrible little things. Now, I’m not saying I’d go as far as Ray Banks does with cats (seriously, the dude is nasty), but I do think cats are evil embodied. I hate them. So, having kids myself, and loving the little blighters and that, I wanted to do something for the kids.

Off The Record features an impressive roll call of authors – you gonna spill the filth you’ve got on them?

Well, don’t tell anyone, but Neil White once got drunk, took off all his clothes, and then punched the Queen. I got the whole thing on video. The whole kitten/Ray Banks deal, I got photos. Steve Mosby still has a publishing deal due to me buying a 1000 copies of each of his books. And Helen FitzGerald…let’s just say I’ll never look at a cactus the same way.

So, yeah, I got stuff on every single one of them. They need the karma uplift.

It’s an interesting mix of commercial names and cult authors  – all your taste or were you being provocative?

I only asked writers I’d had contact with previously, and I kinda make it a rule not to befriend people I think are shit. So, I love all the stories, all my taste…this sounds like I’ve just put this thing together for myself. Damn.

Anyone you want to shove some love at for it? You can gush, it’s manly.

Well usually, I’d go into my usual fanboy mode over Steve Mosby (dude is very close to considering an internet restraining order on my gushing), and I could go for Les Edgerton or Nick Quantrill, as they are two of the coolest guys around who I’m honoured to know. But this time, I’m giving my gushing love to Neil White. Dude has had an incredible 2011, sold over 100,000 copies of his latest book, signed a six figure book deal with Sphere, and still found the time to buy me lasagne (not as nice as Nonna Veste’s) and beer when visiting Liverpool. He had never written a short story before, but said yes anyway to being involved with OTR. He’s a fantastic writer who gets better with every book, and is as down to earth as any Northerner is. White’s going to be huge. And it is well deserved. He works hard at his craft, and it’s always great to see someone get the reward for that.

Why the musical theme?

I was torn between film titles or song titles, and the consensus went with songs. I think that’s because there’s a lot more scope with song titles, more stories to tell etc. I think it works perfectly, as the diverse nature of song choices works with the diversity of the stories. It means there’s something for every taste in there.

You went with Comfortably Numb yourself; so I guess you’re a big Scissor Sisters fan…

I’ve killed for less.

Scissor Sisters. Gah.

No. Comfortably Numb only exists from one band in my mind. Pink Floyd is a band I’ve listened to all my life. My Dad was a huge fan (he eventually put ‘The Wall’ on stage with a group of unemployed musicians in Liverpool in front of 3000 people. It was amazing.), so they were always on in our house. Now, they’re constantly on in my house. Wife thinks I’m 40 years older than I actually am.

Off The Record’s earned honest-to-god rave reviews but it’s new year and people are hungover and skint, why should they part with the last few pennies on their overdraft?

Because for 77p/99c you get 60,000 words, written by some of the best damn writers both sides of the Atlantic, and every last penny or cent of profit goes directly to helping kids read. I mean, what other reason do you need?!

Tempted to do it again yet?  Or still a bit traumatised?

Not yet. I still wake up in a cold sweat mumbling to myself about paragraph breaks. Who knows in the future!

So, what’s coming up for Guilty Conscience Publishing in 2012?

At the moment, things are quiet. But I have plans…big plans.

You quietly slipped out your own collection More Liverpool Five last month. What should we expect from that?

More of the same depressingly uplifting tales from Liverpool. And a lot of death.

Heard you’re working on a novel right now – come on, spill.

Yep. Taking the plunge and trying it out. Early days, but I can reveal someone spends a year in a box. And there’s unethical psychology experiments going on. So it’s a real feel good tale.

Wanna give us a prediction for the Man City game?

Like not betting on my own team, I also never make predictions about them. I hope we win, would be joint fourth then, and who would of predicted that a few months ago. King Kenny is quietly doing the business.

Off The Record is available now as an ebook from Amazon or, if you’re the sentimental sort, in paperback from Lulu.com.  All profits go to charity.

If you’ve read Iain Rowan’s previous book, Nowhere To Go, you’ll already be aware what a talented writer he is.  If not, you’re in for a treat.

Ice Age is a slim but potent collection of eight short stories, superficially horrors but actually far more disturbing.  Rowan doesn’t deal in schlock and gore, he’s a much more considered writer than that.  These stories are set in a painfully ordinary world, bleached out and suburban and perfectly safe, until Rowan twists them slightly, introducing a half-perceived something or an exquisite moment of impossibility.

Through The Window opens on a quiet residential road, outside a house with a broken window.  Would you take a peek?  And what would you do if the woman inside asked you to get her out?  Rowan knows what you should do and he shows you the cost of it.  It is an unsettling story, largely because of how skilfully Rowan builds the character of his protagonist, but also because it plays on deep, campfire fears.  I won’t give away the ending but you’ll see, it does.

Similarly Driving In Circles gives us a recognisable situation to bring our own old anxieties to – we’ve all been there, an unfamiliar country road late at night, no lights, no other cars, just thousands of acres of crushing darkness and distant stars.  In Rowan’s world something stirs in the black fields, one of those ambiguous impossibilities he’s so good at, and it is genuinely disturbing to read.  It will be even more disturbing tomorrow night, driving home through the unlit Essex countryside, I’m sure.

The title story Ice Age, by contrast, is about the shifting darkness inside.  Coppard develops the flu the day his wife leaves him but when it breaks a chill settles in which won’t be warmed.  He’s convinced a new ice age is stealing up on the world, because it can’t just be him, emotional pain can’t be so completely physical can it?  As an exploration of abandonment this story is very powerful, building to a terrible but inevitable ending.

Every story here is superb but special mention to Lilies, which opens the collection.  Set in a nameless European city during wartime it follows Alex, a young man sent back from the front to work as a courier, but with the threat of returning hanging over him.  The city is beautifully rendered, Georgian facades, rattling trams and bodies unclaimed in the streets, single white lilies left on them.  Alex meditates on the suffering of the families who may never find them, but there is a war so it seems natural to us.  Until Alex recounts the resurrection of his dead grandfather.  If that sounds like a cheap trope I can assure you it doesn’t read like one.  With this story Rowan transcends the horror genre.  Lilies is a piece of literary fiction and an excellent piece at that.

Ice Age is a deliciously unnerving collection, incredibly well written – Rowan is a writer in full and firm control of his voice – and one which you will definitely go back to time and again.  I had high expectations after reading Nowhere To Go but Ice Age has actually surpassed it for me.  It is a real gem.

I’ve had this book sitting on my Kindle awhile, waiting for the wintery weather to come, because after a quick peek at the opening story I realised this kind of creepy  fiction is best experienced with snow in the air and a raging fire.

If you want gore this isn’t the collection for you.  It’s chilling stuff, subtle and full of insidious imagery which will stay with you long after you put the book down.  In many ways it’s a collection of fairytales, distinctly modern but with the same themes you find in the Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Anderson, and that same mittel-European darkness.

The Watchers could be an ancient Slavic folk story; a woman whose appearance is different to every person who sees her, shifting to become their ideal, so that she doesn’t know what she looks like herself.  Until she falls in love and stabilises, only to find that no one woman is good enough for any man.  You could read it as a comment on the male gaze and the increasing pornofication of visual culture, but it also a completely timeless ‘curse of beauty’ tale in the mould of Snow White or Daphne and Apollo.

The otherwordliness of The Watchers is present in most stories here and Everington puts just enough on it to unsettle the reader without losing credibility.  He writes in a brisk, unfussy manner and his characters feel familiar in just the right way.  The collection is very cohesive but a couple of stories really stuck out for me.

The Other Room takes on the classic doppelganger plot, transplanting it to a business hotel with Ballardian overtones, where Waits, our wageslave protagonist, walks into a room which is the mirror of his own, filled with his own belongings and registered to a man he has invented.  The mood is claustrophobic and loaded with quiet menace, as Waits is gradually sucked into his double’s world.  Everington teases the story out and delivers with a perfect ending.

Where The Other Room is a unsettling The First Time Buyers is downright disturbing.  Again Everington has taken on one of the genre’s hoariest old chestnuts, the haunted house mystery, binding it up with the state of the property market to place a single, struggling couple on an abandoned housing estate where they are the only residents in a long and lonely row, unfinished buildings all around them.  Then the noises start and a half-glimpsed figure with wrong proportions is seen flitting across the site.  It could be a squatter; it isn’t.  This story is the reason I’m writing a review at two a.m rather than being in bed.  I’m actually too scared to sleep.

The Other Room is an excellent collection, perfect for driving some shafts of darkness through your holiday cheer.

I’ve got this theory on how you find good crime writers, purely non-scientific, but pretty reliable so far.  Check out the author photo and if they look like a right piece of work, you buy the book.  Nine times out of ten you’ll get something decent.  The other one you get Russel D. McLean.

The Death of Ronnie Sweets is a collection of McLean’s early short works featuring Dundee P.I. Sam Bryson – yes Dundee has P.I.s, alright, who do you think tracks down the city’s unfaithful spouses and insurance frauds?  Or, in the case of a more committed character like Bryson, skipped witnesses, nonce councillors and a solicitor with some rather destructive daddy issues.

Across ten short stories McLean builds a credible world around Bryson, the city is present without becoming overbearing and the cast of secondary characters is skilfully deployed, with many recurring right through; there’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo by the protagonist of McLean’s novels, J McNee.

Bryson is an engaging character, less intense than some literary P.I.’s but he feels refreshing for that precise reason.  So he’s handy with his fists and he likes a drink – glass houses, people – he’s also sentimental, loyal and maybe a bit too understanding for his own good.

I was expecting a lot of blood and ruptures in this book, and I wasn’t disappointed, but there’s an emotional element here which is missing from a lot of gritty crime fiction.  Mclean has a keen eye for human frailty and every story has a deep undertow.

This collection is uniformly strong, although you do get a sense of progression in McLean’s writing as it continues, finishing with Flesh and Blood, a heavily freighted story about the responsibilities and abuses of fatherhood – served up with plenty of violence and a surprisingly sweet ending.  Her Cheating Heart is another standout, a short but atmospheric story about a man who desperately needs to be told that his wife is unfaithful.  It’s a two-hander, tough to write but beautifully executed.

The Death of Ronnie Sweets feels very complete for a collection of short stories and promises great things for McLean’s full length novels The Good Son and The Lost Sister.

The accepted wisdom is that you need to hook a reader with the first few lines of your book.  Damien Seaman grabs you by the throat and drags you into a Weimar whorehouse where a detective is desecrating a prostitute’s corpse.

Consider me hooked.

The Killing of Emma Gross could easily have been another by-the-numbers serial killer novel, all the elements are there; picturesque victims, sexual sadism, an investigation marred by personal rivalries.  What lifts it above the norm is Seaman’s impeccable research into the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’ case, which it takes its basic plot from, and more importantly, his good judgement on how much of it show on the page.

Seaman has a light touch and a keen eye for period detail, but never gets mired in the history.  So we get an evocative portrayal of Weimar Düsseldorf, schlepping from pavement cafes to insane asylums, via tenement blocks and jazz clubs and ‘cum cabins’, in a series of fabulous set-pieces sure to be unpopular with the city’s tourist board.

Detective Thomas Klein is a spiky character, tough but sentimental, carrying his own payload of demons – a bit of a wichser in places, but the best detectives, fictional and otherwise, always are.

Seaman’s writing is brisk and efficient, unashamedly noir in tone.  This is a dark book afterall, dealing with some contentious subjects under the cover of a police procedural, and featuring a genuinely disturbing serial killer in Peter Kürten.

The Killing of Emma Gross is an assured debut which really marks Damien Seaman out as one to watch.

The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman, available now from Blasted Heath

This is the second instalment in Lowrance’s Deadland USA series and after the non-stop sturm und drang of Mindless Consumerism things calm down a bit and we get some background to the zombie apocalypse part one pitched us into.  Not an explanation, it’s too early for that.  There’s a hint of governmental creep though, the militarisation of endtime progressing off-stage.

The big thing in Ballroom Blitz is the continuing development of Sam.  His wry, engaging voice was the driving force in part one and with some breathing space Lowrance fleshes him out here.  We see his pre-zombie fighter life, just a regular kid with unusually good taste in music and girlfriend he can’t believe he’s landed.

The action centres around a strongly written set-piece – the first zombie attack Sam witnesses, in the club he’s gone to for his nineteenth birthday.   Looking back he knows it’s the last few moments of normality in his life and so do we.  Everyone’s waiting for the axe to drop.

Lowrance ratchets up the tension then hits us with a full-on zombie ruckus.  Arms come off, faces get chewed up; all your gore needs are catered for.

Ballroom Blitz is another strong piece of work from Heath Lowrance, lean and pacy; you’re going to tear through it.

Ballroom Blitz by Heath Lowrance, out now with Trestle Press

A couple of months ago I read a fabulous short by Gerard Brennan called Nothing But Time, set in HMP Maghaberry, it’s the story of a marked man waiting for the inevitable shiv to the ribs.  There’re no laughs, no comfort, just Brennan telling you how it is in a voice as cold and hard as concrete.

His new novella, The Point, is a different beast entirely.

This is a breakneck rush of a book – a page-turner in a non-schlocky way – full of humour and unexpected warmth.

Paul Morgan is your classic silver-tongued bastard; all mouth and trousers as my nan used to say, a career criminal dead set on drawing his brother Brian down with him.  The plot is simple, what happens when you piss of an insane drug dealer?  You run.  Grab your wee bro and take off to some quiet backwater where you’ll lay low until it blows over.

Paul Morgan won’t lay low though, he can’t.  While he’s inveigling his way into Warrenpoint’s seething underbelly brother Brian is falling in love with one of the most kick-ass femme fatales you’ll have seen in awhile.

Rachel Malone is a fantastic creation and a credit to Brennan’s skills.  Strong, gobby and prone to acts of extreme violence, she’s the kind of girl we can all look up to.

With characters like this on the page Brennan can’t go wrong.  The story rips along, there’re guns and cleavers and some poor guy gets strapped to chair so bad things can be done to him, all the usual ingredients for a cracking crime novel.  The writing is evocative, full of nifty touches and sharp observation, and the dialogue is right on the money.  It also has a cute retro-pulp front cover, if that sort of thing interests you.

The Point has cemented Brennan’s must-watch status for me.  It might be slim but this novella, with its Bateman-esque humour and solid writing, promises great things in the future.

The Point by Gerard Brennan is out now with Pulp Press