Move over, John Rebus, you’ve got company

I like reading police procedural novels, and Alfie Robins’s Reprisal is the best police procedural novel I’ve read in a long time. There is a vicious serial killer making the rounds of northern England’s Kingston-on-Hull (known locally simply as Hull), and Detective Chief Inspector Philip Marlowe and his team have to find him fast. Never mind that the victims are drug addicts, this killer, who administers the final coup de grace by driving a four inch nail into his victim’s skull, gives everyone the chills, and the Superintendent wants him off the streets by yesterday at the latest.  

Reprisal is a classic, bringing to life northern England’s Kingston-on-Hull (known locally simply as Hull) the way Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels put Edinburgh on the map.

Move over, John Rebus, you’ve got competition in Hull. 

The UK’s Night Publishing has scored a crime novel coup with this one. My plea to 

Alfie Robins is a simple one: When is the next installment of Marlowe and his harried crew coming out? Hurry up, please. We’re dying out here waiting for it.  

A definite 5 star read.

Street-centered poetry from a tough part of town

I’ve read enough about Hull, England, to know that it has gone through some rough times, has some mean streets and probably more than a fair share of drugs and too much booze to lubricate and sooth the experience, and has experienced a creative renaissance since the arrival of poet Philip Larkin some years ago. As his publisher says, Mike Watts writes poetry that “looks like Hull, it sounds like Hull and it smells like Hull, a place we are all proud to come from, even if we don't always enjoy the experience of being there at the time.” I can think of any number of cities in the U.S. and elsewhere that fit this description. Though I’ve never lived in one, from reading Mike Watts’ fine book, I can imagine what it's like.

There are some gritty poems in this book, like “Cider Barry”, “Two Things”, “Chaos Magnet” or “Me”. in Cider Barry, “My mate’s a boozer,/ Always smashed on cider,/ Always lost in space,/ Wind milling/ All over the place./ And it troubles me./ It’s horrible./ … He’s no different from me;/ Good home,/ Good family,/ No trauma,/ No tragedy.” Puts a fellow in an awful dilemma. “Come on just a fiver/ You know I’d do the same for you.”/ I know I shouldn’t,/ But tell me,/ What would you do?”

In “Me”, “I’m afraid of change,/ I’m afraid to change,/ I can’t explain why./ Perhaps this life will do./ Perhaps this life will have to do.” “You want to see angry?” he asks in “Chaos Magnet”; “I’ll show you angry./ Try spending a day in the life of me,/ Try fighting chaos constantly.”

Did I say “gritty”? Gritty and hopeless when faced with a life that looks dead-ended in a dead-end kind of place. But is life limited to that? No, but circumstances can make it seem as though it is, especially when booze and drugs are stirred into the mix.

Mike Watts is one of the leaders of the ThisisUll stable of poets, writers and musicians in Hull, England. You can check them out at http://www.thisisull.com/

Five stars for this one.

An outstanding new novel by an outstanding writer

Nigel Lampard is a very good writer, and “Pooh Bridge” is a very, very good book. Billed as a murder mystery, it is also much more than that: it is a story of love lost, love born and intrigue that takes place in England, Germany, Brunei and back to England. In its richness it reminds me of some of the best of John le Carré and Hakan Nesser. I expect to see a lot more from Nigel Lampard; he is really that good.

And now about the book. Marine engineer Richard Blythe has recently lost his wife to cancer. Grief-stricken, he quits his job, sends his teenaged twins Isabelle (Bella) and David off to their boarding school, has his wife’s parents look after his house, and sets off trekking through Derbyshire’s woods to grieve his tremendous loss and recover a sense of who he is and what he wants to do with his life.

Other than being a loving father, Richard Blythe is lost. And then he stumbles over the body of a young Asian woman in the underbrush and it gets interesting. “She was lying in the undergrowth, just off a well-trodden track. If I hadn’t decided to walk that particular track, in that particular wood, I would never have found her.”

Life sometimes has a way of doubling-down on troubles. The police, of course, have suspicions. And from there the story gets very interesting.

“Pooh Bridge” is a book with a cast of characters that I won’t soon forget. I look forward to the next from Nigel Lampard. He has written thirteen novels, so I don’t expect it will be too long before the next one appears. This one is slated to become an easy best-seller. Available in paperback and Kindle.

Rating – a ***** read

Gritty poems and prose from a fine poet

Joe Hakim is a poet, writer and performer from Hull, England. The title of this collection of stories and poems refers to a black hole into which all light vanishes and none escapes. Hull is like that, “a place without hope for so long - even for those working all hours against impossibly dangerous odds - that it has become somewhere which tolerates what would be considered as a failed life anywhere else” (Night Publishing).

We see this in his poem “at withersea”:

When I was a boy this place

felt like the other side of the

world.

I would spend hours hurling

pebbles at the tide and

overturning rocks to find

crabs hiding from the sun,

and then I would run

into the ea. The beaches

would be packed with families,

but now everything is empty.

Shops and cafes are ancient

ruins

and the kids are all on heroin.

Cracked plaster and peeling

paint

is everywhere, houses falling

into disrepair and no one cares.

Like cliffs slowly

falling into the sea, something

crumbles inside me as I watch

the

waves break sadly against the

rocks.

—

a ghost of childhood

laid to rest at last.

Joe Hakim writes gritty poems about life as the poet wanders through his days and nights, everything swathed in shades of grey and dirty black, “wine-stained towels and / sweat shop t-shirts”, moving from place to place as his circumstances change, surviving as best he can a life that has been hard on him.

Joe Hakim, like Paul Perry and Charles Bukowski, is a poet of the dark places, the disjointed life of alcohol and mind-altering drugs that advertise an “expanded reality” but leave one with a bleak sense of reality that caves in on itself just as a black hole does.

“No Light / Might Escape” is an honest book in presenting what life lived in a black hole is like, where one’s lifestyle is surviving rather than living, and where one’s outlook on life is bleak. From my own personal experience, living in that black hole is no fun because it is so terribly limiting, futile and deadly. Leaving it thirty-two years ago broadened my horizons further than I ever thought I could see.

I plan to spend more time with Joe Hakim’s work. It’s a *****.