Now's the Time Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Harvey

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Now’s the Time

  Dexterity

  She Rote

  Confirmation

  Bird of Paradise

  Cheryl

  Work

  Stupendous

  My Little Suede Shoes

  Cool Blues

  Slow Burn

  Billie’s Blues

  Coda

  Copyright

  About the Book

  With his richly praised sequence of novels featuring Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, John Harvey created not only an unforgettable character of great depth and complexity, but a realistic and richly peopled inner-city world of struggling heroes and feckless villains.

  A woman is beaten; a charred body is found in a warehouse: another 4 a.m. call for Charlie Resnick. Gathered together in Now’s The Time are twelve short stories featuring Resnick, including a new story written especially for this edition. ‘Billie’s Blues’ reunites Resnick with the troubled and beautiful Eileen, former stripper and mistress of a gangland boss, and now on the run and in fear for her life.

  From old foes to upstart pretenders, the city and the jazz-soaked, night-time world of Charlie Resnick come vividly to life.

  About the Author

  John Harvey is the author of the richly praised Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century'. His first novel featuring Detective Inspector Frank Elder, Flesh and Blood, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004, and a Barry Award for the Best British Crime Novel published in the US in 2004. In 2007 John Harvey was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger and in 2009 he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nottingham. To find out more about John Harvey visit his website at www.mellotone.co.uk

  Also by John Harvey

  In a True Light

  Nick's Blues

  Gone to Ground

  Far Cry

  The Elder Novels

  Flesh and Blood

  Ash and Bone

  Darkness and Light

  The Resnick Novels

  Lonely Hearts

  Rough Treatment

  Cutting Edge

  Off Minor

  Wasted Years

  Cold Light

  Living Proof

  Easy Meat

  Still Water

  Last Rites

  Cold in Hand

  Short Stories

  Minor Key

  A Darker Shade of Blue

  Poetry

  Ghosts of a Chance

  Bluer Than This

  As Editor

  Blue Lightning

  Men From Boys

  Now’s the Time

  A Collection of Resnick Short Stories

  John Harvey

  Acknowledgments

  ‘Now’s the Time’ first appeared in London Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Serpent’s Tail, London, 1994. Reprinted in Das Grosse Lesebuch Des Englischen Krimis, Goldmann, Germany, 1994.

  ‘Dexterity’ first appeared in No Alibi, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Ringpull Press, Manchester, 1995. Also available in a limited edition from Scorpion Press, Blakeney, Gloucestershire.

  ‘She Rote’ first appeared in Fresh Blood, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Mike Ripley, The Do-Not Press, London, 1996. Reprinted in The Year’s 25 Finest Crime & Mystery Stories, Carroll & Graf, 1996.

  ‘Confirmation’ first appeared in The Orion Book of Murder, edited by Peter Haining, Orion, London, 1996.

  ‘Bird of Paradise’ first appeared in ‘Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’, May 1997. Reprinted in The Cutting Edge, edited by Janet Hutchings, Carroll & Graf, 1998, and in The Year’s 25 Finest Crime & Mystery Stories, Carroll & Graf, 1998.

  ‘Cheryl’ first appeared in City of Crime, edited by David Belbin, Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 1997.

  ‘Stupendous’ first appeared in Eine Leiche Zum Geburststag, edited by Ronald Gutberlet, Rowohlt, Germany, 1997.

  ‘My Little Suede Shoes’ first appeared in Mean Time, edited by Jerry Sykes, The Do-Not Press, London, 1998.

  ‘Cool Blues’ first appeared in Blue Lightning, edited by John Harvey, Slow Dancer Press, 1998.

  ‘Billie’s Blues’ was first published by Rivages, France, 2002.

  Spike Robinson

  1930–2001

  Introduction

  Somewhere back in the late eighties, I was living in Nottingham, writing mainly for television – and wondering if maybe I should have a crack at a crime novel again. I’d tried before, a little over ten years earlier, and the results had not been encouraging: a series of four paperback originals, their titles lifted from the Bob Dylan songbook, and featuring Scott Mitchell, a mawkish private eye with his office in London’s Covent Garden and his character stranded awkwardly over the mid-Atlantic. The immediate models for this misbegotten project were obvious: the first four Spenser novels by Robert Parker and, to a lesser degree, the Hazell books written by Terry Venables and Gordon Williams under the pen name of P. B. Yuill. Behind these, of course, hovered the domineering influence of Raymond Chandler – classics of the form and first consumed by me in their green Penguin editions when I was still at school.

  Cocky and naive as I was, my avowed intention was to soar where Venables and Williams had flown and others had stuttered and fallen back to earth – the Scott Mitchell books were going to be the first perfect distillation of Chandler’s literate, wisecracking style into a true English setting. Of course, though I couldn’t see this at the time, they failed miserably. Chandler’s style, while easy to parody, is dangerously difficult – near impossible – for another writer to achieve. So the books were derivative, stereotypical, over-sentimental, devoid of originality, observation or wit. And worse, there they were in their appropriately garish covers, reproaching me for my presumption, my lack of judgement – for trying to run when I could scarcely walk.

  But by 1987, two things had happened: I’d become involved in a television series called Hard Cases and I had – albeit belatedly – discovered Elmore Leonard.

  Hard Cases, which ran for two seasons, was a drama series which revolved around the work and lives of a team of probation officers based in Nottingham’s inner city and its genesis lay in the long-running American police series, Hill Street Blues. As a writer, I was fascinated by the construction of Hill Street, its pace and verve, the swerving shifts of tone, the number of running characters and story lines it juggled with apparent ease. So I sat down with my video tapes, my stop watch and my note book and plotted it all out, minute by minute, scene by scene; stripped episodes down to their constituent parts and examined the machinery before, first laboriously, later happily, reassembling something with a similar form – only instead of focusing on a stressed-out, over-worked and under-financed group of police officers, my story lines revolved around the probation service and its clients.

  Luck played a hand. I was putting the finishing touches to my master plan when I read an interview with the near-legendary drama supremo, Ted Childs, asking why there were no British scripts with the qualities of Hill Street Blues. I phoned my agent, my agent phoned him . . . all right, it wasn’t quite that simple, but eventually Central Television commissioned and ran six episodes of Hard Cases, which, if they didn’t set the world alight, did contain some strong dramatic moments, some flights of fancy.

  In possibly my favourite sequence, a young officer, faced with a psychotic transsexual actor threatening suicide, talks him down from his locked dressing room by doing Erich von Stroheim to the actor�
�s Gloria Swanson, allowing us to pay an elaborate homage to Sunset Boulevard. But this was, after all, British television, and British television is, for historical reasons, steeped in the documentary tradition. So the far-fetched moments of the imagination were always going to be anchored by the left-leaning social concerns of such film makers as Ken Loach. And no bad thing.

  Besides, there we were filming on the streets of Nottingham, the same streets and pubs that had been frequented by the young D. H. Lawrence and later by the Alan Sillitoe of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. There were traditions to be upheld.

  The tradition behind Hill Street Blues, of course, that of the multi-character, multi-storyline police drama, leads in other directions: the pioneering 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain and the latter, L. A. based books by policeman turned writer, Joseph Wambaugh.

  Elmore Leonard, as I’d been discovering, comes from a different part of the crime tradition. Less concerned with cops and private eyes, as heroes at least, and shunning the prevalent fascination with serial killers and the profilers and pathologists that follow in their wake, Leonard’s books revolve, in the main, around those who strut and stumble around the lower reaches of the criminal world. These are character studies, deftly assembled with humour and affection, and the characters are defined by private moralities and impossible ambitions; these are people who see the world askew and are thus incapable of seeing the impossibility – or the humour – of their situation. For these are also comic novels: comedy of character and situation spun along by dialogue which, in common with the best of its kind – Mamet, Higgins, Ross Thomas, Bill James – suggests truth and realism through artifice, by means of artfully constructed rhythms and repetitions.

  Leonard’s books lean, I think, more towards Hammett than Chandler – though there is some of Chandler’s romanticism present – while his characters might find their roots in the worlds of James M. Cain and, especially, Horace McCoy. I wouldn’t be surprised if Leonard read and enjoyed Donald Westlake and Ross Thomas and when I saw somewhere that his favourite crime novel was George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle that was no surprise at all.

  La Brava is, I think, my favourite Leonard novel, though Freaky Deaky and parts of Bandits run it close. What is certain is that reading these and others made me want to get back into the water myself and write crime again. Only by now I hope I’d learned a lesson: I didn’t want to try and write like Elmore Leonard, I wanted to write as well. And if I haven’t managed it yet, hey! What’s wrong with a little ambition?

  What I wanted was to take Leonard’s dialogue-led, character-led approach and bring it to the mix of multiple narratives and urban realism that had been at the heart of Hard Cases. A police series set in the streets of Nottingham.

  And at this stage another piece of good luck presented itself. Not long before, teaching on an Arvon Foundation writing week, I had met the writer Dulan Barber and we had quickly become good friends. Dulan liked opera, Sarah Vaughan, Dusty Springfield and good wine – though, at a pinch, indifferent would do; he wrote crime novels under the name of David Fletcher and supernatural thrillers as Owen Brookes; he knew as much about putting a book together as anyone I have ever met and was generous and selfless with his time. We started to talk about the ideas I had for a projected novel – the one that would become Lonely Hearts – and for a central character, a conscientious but shabbily-dressed policeman, who would gradually emerge, prompted by Dulan’s comments and questions, as Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick.

  Rockford, as I would say, dressed by Columbo’s tailor.

  A sober, shadow version of the policeman played so expertly by Robert Foxworth in Harold Becker’s film of Wambaugh’s The Black Marble, a hard-drinking, soft-centred officer of Russian descent.

  Little by little, as Dusty would sing, the pegs on which to hang Resnick’s character came clear: the Polish background, the delicatessen sandwiches, the cats, the love of jazz. And then the squad that would work with him: Lynn Kellogg, able, fresh-faced, overweight; Graham Millington, dour and unimaginative, steadfast, eternally smitten by Petula Clark; Divine, in whom all the blinkered prejudices of the worst police officers reign incarnate.

  Lonely Hearts was first published here by Viking in 1989; an American edition by Henry Holt in the same year. Nine other novels have followed, finishing in 1998 with Last Rites, which brought the sequence to an end after ten books. Ten books, five years, give or take, in the lives of Resnick and his team and of the city in which they are set. From the Thatcherite eighties to the New Labour nineties – I suspect for many of those who people these novels, little has changed.

  And Resnick? Older certainly, still capable of inspiring respect and affection from his team, though he’ll never ascend to the middle-management excellence exhibited by Frank Furillo in Hill Street Blues. Readers have observed a certain mellowness of late, a coming-to-terms; though his temper’s probably closer to the surface now than at any time since 1989. He still relaxes listening to Monk and Billie, Spike Robinson and Lester Young; despite similar eating habits, he seems to have learned to work his way through a triple-decker sandwich without spraying the contents over shirt and tie.

  From my point of view, he’s tired; needs a rest.

  In the short stories, some of them, he gets just that. Often he’s a peripheral figure, keeping his counsel and his distance while the hapless Snapes and Ray-os of his world go round in ever decreasing circles.

  That there are stories at all is down to Maxim Jakubowski, who commissioned me to write the first and then several more; latterly to others like Ed Gorman and Jerry Sykes who liked what they’d read and wanted more.

  Even though I’d tried my hand at most kinds of writing, the short story was something I’d steered clear of. Out of fear: fear of not being able to do it right, not being able to do it at all. I’d read them, of course: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Updike, Malamud; Alice Adams, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Tallent, Bobbie Anne Mason, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford; Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake and John Lutz. The two or three attempts I’d made had finally found homes for themselves in the littlest of little magazines.

  But Maxim was forceful; he didn’t brook much argument. And besides, a tale in which Resnick comes down to London, maybe listens to a little jazz. What’s the problem? Where’s the harm?

  I suspect ‘Now’s the Time’ may be the weakest story here (so if you’re reading them in sequence, show some forbearance!) but the important thing was it got me started. More importantly, I found that I enjoyed it. And so ten more followed, most named after a Charlie Parker composition, some light enough for the wind to blow through them, some carrying, in a concentrated fashion, the same burdens as the novels.

  I found I was thinking more and more of the stories as footnotes to the longer work, as testing ground on which to walk characters who might graduate into the bigger leagues. So ‘Now’s the Time’ concludes the story of Ed Silver, the jazz musician who appears in Cutting Edge, while Raymond Cooke – Ray-o – the adolescent abattoir worker from Off Minor, scabs and scavenges his way across four stories only to re-emerge in the final novel, Last Rites. Indeed, if you read ‘She Rote’, ‘Confirmation’, ‘Work’ and ‘Stupendous’ in that order, the story of Raymond and his extended family, his Uncle Terry and various crooked cohorts, and, not least, Terry’s troubled girl friend, Eileen, they become a novel in their own right, albeit one with overlaps and gaps.

  The Snape family – Norma, Shane, Sheena and Nicky – first appeared in ‘Dexterity’, before featuring centrally in Easy Meat and more tangentially in Last Rites. Grabianski, the compassionate burglar who first shinned up a drainpipe in Rough Treatment, holds the centre of ‘Bird of Paradise’, in which he evinces a passion both for the little-known canvases of the British Impressionists and for Sister Teresa of the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help – both obsessions travelling with him into Still Water.

  There are two stories in this collection which have not appeared
before. ‘Work’ was written for a book of erotic crime fiction, edited by Ed Gorman and entitled Careless Whispers; sadly, some of the fiction – not I think, mine – was adjudged by the prospective publishers to be too erotic by half and its appearance has been put on hold. ‘Slow Burn’, the longest story here, is based upon a radio script I wrote for BBC Radio 4, for whom it was produced by David Hunter. Anyone who listened to that broadcast, and blessed with an especially good memory, will notice significant changes in plot and character – though nothing as severe as my radio adaptation of Cutting Edge, in which I changed the identity of the murderer between printed page and spoken word. Author’s privilege.

  I hope you enjoy some of these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them, as much as I have enjoyed writing about them.

  John Harvey, London, 1998.

  Introduction to the 2002 edition

  When I agreed to write a new story for this edition, I did so with a degree of trepidation. I thought it might be too much like pulling teeth. Radio work aside, I’d written nothing about Charlie for several years; new characters, new situations had been uppermost in my mind. But then, long before I thought it would happen, the initial scene – the discovery of the body on frozen ground near the city centre – came to me clear and entire, and I knew it was another chance to continue the story of Terry Cooke’s mistress, Eileen, which already runs through a number of the stories in this collection. And Resnick himself? He arrived in response to that awful, but always half-expected four a.m. call, pretty much as before; recognisable, to me at least – a man I found I was more than happy to spend time with again.