Freddy Valentine

In a previous life, I used to have a website called Trash Fiction. Well, I still have the  site, but sadly I haven't had the time to update it for, oh, over a decade now. Despite which, I remain a self-proclaimed lover of pulp fiction and, in that capacity, I'd like to recommend a fabulous radio play/audiobook in the shape of David Chaudoir's Freddy Valentine and the Soho Ghoul.

On Trash Fiction I used to start with the blurb on the back of the book. This is the equivalent from iTunes:

Freddie Valentine is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, coated in a purple paisley veneer. A record producer, a nightclub crooner, the one-time manager of the heavy metal band Satan's Claw, the bastard son of an eccentric aristocrat, a dabbler in the dark arts - some or none of this might be true. It was the year 2013 but the man dressed in a purple safari suit and stack-heeled boots, and his hair was a matted bird's nest of the Jimi Hendrix Experience variety. He spoke like an East End barrow boy, read trashy women's magazines and kept a budgie called Grayson.

Detective Chetwyn has a problem. He believes his chief superintendent might be a vampire. He believes that Valentine might be one as well, and that he's going to be bumped off by Valentine's Polish hard-man Osaki.

This kind of free-wheeling, over-the-top camp fantasy is a tricky act to pull off. It's all too easy for weird to shade into wacky, for humour to come across as smartarse smugness. Happily, Chaudoir gets it right. This is genuine, unadulterated, Grade A pulp writing.

Picture this: Heavy Metal Kid Gary Holton as a decadent cockney fop with a talent for mind-reading; Richard Davies from Please Sir! as a Welsh copper, plagued with irritable bowel syndrome, who feels that his wife and daughters are conspiring to condemn him to premature middle age; and professional wrestler Mal 'King Kong' Kirk as a Polish misfit 'rumoured to have punched Lech Waleska in a bar fight in Gdansk'. All of them appearing in a story written by Arthur Brown (loosely adapted from an Arthur Machen original) and directed by Ken Russell.

Something like that anyway.

The central trio of characters are all splendidly ludicrous, the storyline is excessive without being (too) silly, and there's an unmistakeable intelligence at work. There are some fine turns of phrase: if the literary version of vampires were accurate, then the world would be plunged into a 'Mathusian fanged apocalypse'. And there are some lovely asides: the members of a golf club 'liked to have a senior police officer popping in now and again. It added to their misplaced sense of superiority.' In addition to which, I find it hard to resist a text that laments the state of modern cigarettes and yearns for the good old brands of Piccadilly, Woodbine and Gitane.

As far as I know, this is a home-made production, but it sounds professional enough: the narration and acting are convincing, and there are enough bits of music and sound effects to lift it.

I'd hope that this is the start of a continuing series (in whatever format) featuring the characters, but in the meantime, Freddy Valentine and the Soho Ghoul is available here.

There'll Always Be an England

As a contribution to the growing fascination with early-eighties leftist politics and culture, I thought I'd post here my review of David Pinner's 1984 novel There'll Always Be an England. I wrote this some fifteen years ago for a site called Trash Fiction, which is now preserved under some dust-sheets in the attic:

David Pinner was originally an actor (he starred in The Mousetrap) before becoming a writer, principally of stage-plays such as Lenin In Love and Potsdam Quartet. He also, however, wrote the novel Ritual, which became the legendary film The Wicker Man in 1973 with a script by Anthony Shaffer. And he wrote this curio from the 1980s. I don't know anything about his politics but I suspect he's a traditionalist Labour man, since the temporary (as they turned out) successes of the left in the Labour Party of the early-1980s clearly scared the Bejesus out of him.

The whole of the novel is a diatribe against Trotskyist infiltration into the Labour Party and the inability or unwillingness of mainstream Labour to defend itself. The protagonists - old-school MP Roy Hampton, and Militantesque Terry McMasters - exist as mouthpieces for political positions rather than as characters, and the same is true of just about everyone else in the book. This, for example, is Hampton's ex-girlfriend engaging in dinner conversation with a clergyman who makes the mistake of saying that Marxism and Christianity have a lot in common; she's explaining where he's gone wrong:

For instance, Marx wrote an article called On The Jewish Question, which reminds me of another 'great' German's credo. For in this particular article Marx affirmed: 'What is the secular basis of Judaism? Self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. We recognise in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time.' And the Great Man ended his particular tirade with a sentiment which would have done credit to Hitler and Stalin, who as you know, Vicar, were both dedicated anti-Semites. For Marx proclaimed: 'Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism - huckstering and its preconditions - the Jew will have become impossible!'

I don't know people who talk like that over dinner. Considering that Pinner is primarily a dramatist, his dialogue is a little clunky. After a couple more drinks, the same character makes her - and the book's - position perfectly clear:

...although I would be the first to admit that Thatcher's authoritarian right-wing Toryism is potentially dangerous, it's the totalitarian left wing of the Labour Party which is the greater threat to the continuance of our democracy. If the hard left ever come to power in this country, which they may well do in the next ten years or so, they will be much harder to remove from office than Mrs Thatcher's present administration.

Of course, it turned out we didn't need to worry. The hard left was so damn unpopular that it couldn't even have got elected in 1997. But if you want to revisit the nightmares Tony Benn inspired in the 1980s - before he became the venerable old democrat that we pretend he is today - then this is just the book for you.

The Day of the Women

Now that Sandi Toksvig has finally left Radio 4's The News Quiz to put her energies into the Women's Equality Party, it's perhaps a good time to remember one of my favourite works of exploitation fiction: Pamela Kettle's The Day of the Women.

Published by the New English Library (who else?) in 1970, it tells the story of a new women-only political party called IMPULSE. The leader is named Diana Druce, and this is her telling her followers how to explain the party to their husbands:

Remind them that men have not found a way to lead this country out of trouble so far; that we have swung like a pendulum from crisis to crisis. In the past they have made war and even in victory have not known how to resolve peace. They have misused power over our economy and mishandled our international relationships. You know it is true. I know it is true. But we have to face up to the fact that your husbands are better informed politically than you are. They might confuse you with argument and you do not have the knowledge or experience to answer them back effectively. Not yet.

As the cover suggests, the party is instantly successful, sweeping into power at a general election. At which stage, obviously, the going gets a bit tougher.

It's not, to be honest, a great book, but maybe one day it'll earn itself a place in history as a prediction, forty-five years before the fact, of the inevitable rise of the Women's Equality Party.