BUT BEAUTIFUL by Geoff Dyer (Abacus; #7.99)
Three rousing cheers and a chorus of My Funny Valentine for this reprint of one of the few truly imaginative (as opposed to merely informative or worthy) books ever written about jazz. It's a collection of boldly fictionalised vignettes from the lives of the (mostly modern) greats, some of them based on things that really happened (like poor lost boy Chet Baker getting his teeth, a trumpet player's greatest asset next to his lip, knocked out in a brawl), others expanded into apocryphal epiphanies from nothing more than the look of an old photograph. How truthfully Dyer really gets inside the heads of his heroes is debatable - he's first and foremost a fan, not a biographer - but as a work of art the important thing is that it should feel true, and it surely does. It's fashionable to knock the elegiacally romantic image of the jazz life, but for Dyer it's emotionally and ideologically inseparable
from the music: for him, a man who could live a regular life could never mine this great sad music out of his soul. Blue, but beautiful.
BLEEDING LONDON by Geoff Nicholson (Indigo; #5.99)
Not since William Wordsworth stumbled across the Pathetic Fallacy have English writers been so obsessed with that very English thing, talking about the weather, as they seem to be today: for moody young dirty-realists like Geoff Nicholson, it's always raining in their hearts, and their characters do their crying in the rain. What are all these brooding paragraphs on the surly, ominous London weather for? Two reasons, I think: Martin Amisolatry, and even more, that ridiculously self-limiting modern fashion for making the novel as much like a film as possible. This essay in lowlife gloom deserves to be more like a novel, and less dictatorially visual, because it could have been a very good novel indeed. The central conceit of a hero determined to walk every street in the city before he dies takes us into the psycho-geographical depths of excellent writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd,
and there's an eerie pathos at work reminiscent of the early London novels of Angela Carter. Better than the run of its particular mill, but frustratingly recognisable as part of it, too.
KING CON by Stephen J Cannell (Michael Joseph; #9.99)
Fans of Quentin Tarantino, Damon Runyon and David Mamet should enjoy this slightly coarse but exhilaratingly energetic American comedy-thriller: it's got the crackerjack black-comedy violence of the first, the extravagant characterisation of the second and the viciously uncoiling Chinese-boxes plotting of Mamet's classic con-game movie House of Games. That makes two cinematic influences to one literary, which is no surprise once you know that Stephen J Cannell has been knocking out all kinds of movie scripts since the 1970s, and his day job shows through strongly in this novel's preference for dialogue over narrative and action over introspection. Yet despite the ferocious speed and momentum Cannell develops in pushing the story (a road-movie construction about Beano X, a golden-hearted grifter who enlists the help of a female FBI agent to help him take a suitable revenge on the New Jersey
mob boss who murdered his cousin) from one fraught situation to another, there's always time to relish the atmosphere of the ancient art of confidence. Not bad at all.
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