Men from Boys

by John Harvey

  CONTENTS

  About the Authors

  Also by John Harvey

  Title Page

  Permissions

  Introduction

  Mark Billingham

  Dancing Towards the Blade

  Lawrence Block

  Points

  Michael Connelly

  After Midnight

  Jeffery Deaver

  The Poker Lesson

  John Harvey

  Chance

  Reginald Hill

  The Boy and Man Booker

  Bill James

  Like an Arrangement

  Dennis Lehane

  Until Gwen

  Bill Moody

  The Resurrection of Bobo Jones

  George P. Pelecanos

  Plastic Paddy

  Peter Robinson

  Shadow on the Water

  James Sallis

  Concerto for Violence and Orchestra

  John Straley

  Life Before the War

  Brian Thompson

  Geezers

  Don Winslow

  Douggie Doughnuts

  Daniel Woodrell

  Two Things

  Andrew Coburn

  My Father’s Daughter

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Mark Billingham is the author of a series of novels featuring London-based DI Tom Thorne, the latest of which is Lazybones. The second in the series, Scaredy Cat was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of 2002. He has also worked for many years as a stand-up comedian which some regard as big and brave, while others think it just shows a child-like need for attention. Mark tells jokes for money far less frequently these days, as those that read the books are not usually drunk, and can’t throw things.

  Visit his manly, yet also boyish website at: www.markbillingham.com.

  Lawrence Block has never been a short-order cook, an over-the-road truck driver, or a professional prize fighter, nor has he gone to sea. He has written any number of books, the latest of which is Small Town, which, like its author, is set in New York City.

  Andrew Coburn is the author of eleven novels. His work has been translated into nine languages, and three of his novels have been made into films noir in France. Grace Stassio, writing for Under Cover, says that while reading Coburn, ‘he goes down like neat Scotch, nice and smooth’. In real life Mr Coburn prefers skimmed milk stormed with Hershey Syrup, the harsher the Hershey the better. The New York Times says, ‘Coburn writes in a brilliant style of chilly elegance and is merciless in probing tormented characters.’ Mr Coburn is unlikely ever to disagree with this.

  Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia but grew to manhood while living in various parts of Florida, where his story in this volume is set. He has published thirteen crime novels and after a decade and a half living in Los Angeles has recently returned to Florida where he is busy regressing from man to boy with the aid of a fishing pole.

  Former journalist, folk singer and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is the author of eighteen novels; he’s been nominated for five Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America as well as an Anthony Award, and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award for best Short Story of the Year. His most recent book is The Vanishing Man, a Lincoln Rhyme novel.

  Readers can visit his website at: www.jefferydeaver.com.

  He acknowledges the excellent book, Scarne’s Guide to Modern Poker, which was very helpful in writing the story in this collection.

  John Harvey is the author of ten Charlie Resnick novels, the stand-alone In a True Light and four short stories featuring Jack Kiley, of which ‘Chance’ is the most recent. He has previously edited Blue Lightning, a collection of short fiction with musical themes. For more fax ’n’ info, check out www.mellotone.co.uk.

  For those who want to chase it down, the Townes Van Zandt recording referred to in ‘Chance’ is A Far Cry From Dead and is available on Arista 07822-18888-2.

  Reginald Hill has written a lot of books and hopes to write a lot more. He has won awards but can’t remember where he put them. He lives happily in the Lake District from which he can only be extracted by large sums of money or alien abduction. People with large sums of money, or aliens, should contact his agent.

  Bill James has published nineteen crime novels featuring Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Isles and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur. Reviewers describe Isles variously as clinically mad, Satanic, terrifyingly violent and instantly recognisable as an A.C.C. Harpur’s wife was murdered and he longs to be remembered as an inspired single parent. ‘Like an Arrangement’ is taken from the twentieth Harpur and Isles book, The Girl With the Long Back, due out late 2003. James also published spy novels and another crime series set around Cardiff docks.

  Dennis Lehane is the author of seven novels, including Mystic River and his latest, Shutter Island. He often sets his short stories in the American South, where he lived for eight years until he tired of people not getting his jokes and moved back to Boston. He continues to live in Boston with two English bulldogs, Marlon and Stella, who don’t get his jokes either.

  Author-drummer Bill Moody has toured and recorded with Maynard Ferguson, Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Jon Hendricks and Lou Rawls. Looking for Chet Baker is the fifth in the Evan Horne mystery series. Moody lives in northern California, where he plays jazz and teaches at Sonoma State University.

  George Pelecanos never fully made the transition from boy to man. For more on his books and other obsessions – Westerns, action films, soul and punk, blaxploitation, film noir, musclecars, ladies’ shoes, ladies’ feet, etc – go to www.georgepelecanos.com.

  Peter Robinson is the author of the Inspector Banks series. His short story ‘Missing in Action’ won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2001. Though he thinks he’s a man, there are those who say he’ll always be a little boy at heart.

  Jim Sallis is a poet, novelist and all-round literary hired gun. Author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin cycle, Jim has also published books on musicology, multiple collections of poems, stories and essays, a biography of Chester Himes and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. His work appears regularly in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, in mystery and science fiction magazines (for one of which, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he writes a books column), and in major US newspapers such as the Washington Post and Boston Globe. He loves Mozart, Hawaiian and steel guitar, French literature and, most of all, his wife, Karyn.

  John Straley is a former private investigator who lives in Sitka, Alaska. His poems and essays have appeared in various journals in North America. He is the author of six novels featuring private investigator Cecil Younger.

  Brian Thompson was born in Lambeth, London, read English at Cambridge and now lives in Oxford. His most recent works are Imperial Vanities (HarperCollins, 2003) and Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller (Short Books, 2002).

  Don Winslow has worked as a movie theatre manager, a production assistant on documentaries and a private investigator. In addition to being an author, he now works as an independent consultant on issues involving litigation arising from criminal behaviour. His novels include The Death and Life of Bobby Z and California Fire and Life.

  Daniel Woodrell is the author of seven novels, has twice been a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award, and won the PEN Center West Award for the novel Tomato Red. He lives happily in the boonies of America, which is a region beyond the sticks, out past Podunk and way downriver from Nowheresville. His house has a bedroom and a half and a flush toilet, and he is not above bragging about either luxury to his neighbours. He figures Roy Rogers said it best, ‘When you take the boy out of the man, you haven’t got much left.’

  ALSO BY JOHN HAR
VEY

  In a True Light

  The Resnick Novels

  Lonely Hearts

  Rough Treatment

  Cutting Edge

  Off Minor

  Wasted Years

  Cold Light

  Living Proof

  Easy Meat

  Still Water

  Last Rites

  Now’s the Time

  The Complete Resnick Short Stories

  Poetry

  Ghosts of a Chance

  Bluer Than This

  As Editor

  Blue Lightning

  You can visit John Harvey’s website at

  www.mellotone.co.uk

  MEN FROM BOYS

  Edited by

  John Harvey

  ‘Points’ by Lawrence Block. First published in Enough Rope (William Morrow, New York, 2002). © Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘The Resurrection of Bobo Jones’ by Bill Moody. First published in B flat, Bebop, Scat: Jazz Short Stories & Poems, edited by Chris Parker (Quartet Books, London, 1986). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  A version of ‘Like an Arrangement’ by Bill James appears in the novel The Girl With the Long Back (Constable, London, 2003). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  INTRODUCTION

  It began with a simple enough idea: a book which would collect together stories by those writers in the crime and mystery area whose work I respect, admire and enjoy most. Simple? Well, no.

  For one thing, the choice would be too vast, the book too large. But then, unbidden, the title leapt to mind: Men from Boys. And once it was there, lodged in my brain, it wouldn’t leave. It was – it is – a kind of statement, a declaration, but also, and crucially, it provided a focus and a theme.

  It also had the effect of cutting the number of writers I might have approached by half. No McDermid, no Fyfield, no Stella Duffy; no Grafton, no Paretsky, no Julie Smith. No Alice Sebold. No Suzanne Berne.

  Just men.

  Men writing, for the most part, about what it is to be a man.

  To succeed; to fail. To open one’s eyes.

  What the majority of the pieces in the collection address, some directly, others more tangentially, are issues of self-knowledge, of accepting – or denying – certain responsibilities. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a son? What does it mean to be a man?

  As the protagonist in Don Winslow’s ‘Douggie Doughnuts’ comes to realise, there are things you do and things you don’t do. Again and again – but never two ways the same – the people who inhabit these stories are having to determine what is right, what will give them dignity, what will earn them self-respect.

  Some – the young men in Mark Billingham’s ‘Dancing Towards the Blade’ or Michael Connelly’s ‘After Midnight’, for instance – make their choices with their fathers’ voices ringing in their ears; others have to contend with parents who are venal at best, incorrigibly corrupt at worst.

  Little is perfect. In Daniel Woodrell’s beautifully understated ‘Two Things’, the best a father can say of his relationship with his son is that it was ‘something terrible I have lived through’. Andrew Coburn’s marvellous novella takes us through three generations of an extended family whose members variously fall to sudden acts of violence or simple self-regarding avarice, and where the strength of purpose and single-mindedness of the father is passed on not to the son but to the daughter.

  So did I achieve my aim to include all of those, now admittedly male, writers I revere? Of course not. No matter how many times I wrote and faxed, e-mailed and phoned, no matter how much pleading and cajoling I engaged in, there were some – a few – whose dance cards, for whatever reason, were regretfully too full. A pleasant diversionary party game might be to guess who these were. Just don’t ask: I’ll never tell.

  But if all had accepted that would have simply meant a bigger book. There is no one here whose name I am not pleased and proud to include; no piece of work that has not earned its place.

  The trouble with writing short stories, as James Ellroy has recently lamented, and as most of us I’m sure would agree, is that they take so damned long to write. For every earnestly crafted page, at least a chapter of a novel would likely come whizzing off the computer and with less heartache. ‘There is no room for error in short stories,’ says Annie Proulx. ‘The lack of a comma can throw everything off.’

  That’s why we keep doing it, of course. Trying to. One reason, anyway. Testing ourselves, testing the skill. It certainly isn’t, unless we’re lucky enough to turn heads at The New Yorker, for the money.

  ‘There’s a joy’, says Donald Westlake (and, yes, he’d be in here if I had my way), ‘in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art.’ He compares writing short stories with playing jazz: ‘a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting’. He says it’s what turns writers on. Readers too.

  There’s a real pleasure for me in the way the writers of these stories create worlds that are instantly recognisable and believable yet as widely apart as a deprived London housing estate and the trenches of the First World War, the claustrophobia of a late-night back-room poker game or a rundown jazz joint in Manhattan and the slow but irrevocable decay of the small New England town on which Don Winslow riffs so passionately. I’m in awe, too, of the way James Sallis leads us through a landscape delineated with absolute clarity, except that by kicking away the narrative props that we’re used to, the scene takes on a bewildering half-amnesiac state which mirrors what is going on in the central character’s mind.

  The prospect of Bill James’s lustful yet lethal Assistant Chief Constable Isles let loose in a posh private girls’ school and of Brian Thompson’s semi-retired geezers girding up their loins to take on the Russian mafia both fill me with delight, and I give myself up joyously to the promise of Dennis Lehane’s ‘Until Gwen’, whose first sentence hurtles us along with dangerous expectation. ‘Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight-ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.’

  And . . .

  But enough from me. Enjoy. Read on.

  John Harvey

  London, January 2003

  DANCING TOWARDS THE BLADE

  Mark Billingham

  He was always Vincent at home.

  At school there were a few boys who called him ‘Vince’, and ‘Vinny’ was yelled more often than not across the playground, but his mother and father never shortened his name and neither did his brothers and sisters whose own names, in turn, were also spoken in full.

  ‘Vincent’ around the house then, and at family functions. The second syllable given equal weight with the first by the heavy accent of the elder members. Not swallowed. Rhyming with ‘went’.

  Vincent was not really bothered what names people chose to use, but there were some things it was never pleasant to be called.

  ‘Coon!’

  ‘Fucking coon . . .’

  ‘Black coon. Fucking black bastard . . .’

  He had rounded the corner and stepped into the passageway to find them waiting for him. Like turds in long grass. A trio of them in Timberland and Tommy Hilfiger. Not shouting, but simply speaking casually. Saying what they saw. Big car. Hairy dog. Fucking black bastard . . .

  Vincent stopped, caught his breath, took it all in.

  Two were tallish – one abnormally thin, the other shaven-headed – and both cradling cans of expensive lager. The third was shorter and wore a baseball cap, the peak bent and pulled down low. He took a swig of Smirnoff Ice, then began to bounce on the balls of his feet, swinging the frosted glass bottle between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What you staring at, you sooty cunt?’

  Vincent reckoned they were fifteen or so. Year eleven boys. The skinny one was maybe not even that, but all of them were a little younger than he was.

  From somewhere a few streets away came the n
oise of singing, tuneless and incoherent, the phrases swinging like bludgeons. Quick as a flash, the arms of the taller boys were in the air, lager cans clutched in pale fists, faces taut with blind passion as they joined in the song.

  ‘No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don’t care . . .’

  The smaller boy looked at Vincent and shouted above the noise, ‘Well?’

  It was nearly six o’clock and starting to get dark. The match had finished over an hour ago but Vincent had guessed there might still be a few lads knocking about. He’d seen a couple outside the newsagent as he’d walked down the ramp from the tube station. Blowing onto bags of chips. Tits and guts moving beneath their thin, replica shirts. The away fans were long gone and most of the home supporters were already indoors, but there were others, most who’d already forgotten the score, who still wandered the streets, singing and drinking. Waiting in groups, a radio tuned to 5 Live. Standing in lines on low walls, the half-time shitburgers turning to acid in their stomachs, looking around for it . . .

  The cut-through was no more than fifteen feet wide and ran between two three-storey blocks. It curled away from the main road towards the block where Vincent lived at the far end of the estate. The three boys who barred his way were gathered around a pair of stone bollards, built to dissuade certain drivers from coming on to the estate. From setting fire to cars on people’s doorsteps.

  Vincent answered the question, trying to keep his voice low and even, hoping it wouldn’t catch. ‘I’m going home . . .’

  ‘Fucking listen to him. A posh nigger . . .’

  The skinny boy laughed and the three came together, shoulders connecting, forearms nudging one another. When they were still again they had taken up new positions. The three now stood, more or less evenly spaced across the walkway, one in each gap. Between wall and bollard, bollard and bollard, bollard and wall . . .

  ‘Where’s home?’ the boy in the cap said.

  Vincent pointed past the boy’s head. The boy didn’t turn. He raised his head and Vincent got his first real look at the face, handsome and hard, shadowed by the peak of the baseball cap. Vincent saw something like a smile as the boy brought the bottle to his lips again.