I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 19 in the series.
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Sample banter:
“Pimlico, if you hadn’t been doing bird when this first come up, you’d have been in for a full-whack of 150,000 oncers. That’s villas, class crumpet and a Ferrari. Still, ten grand aint too shabby, right?”
Pimlico, “Pim” to his lucky friends – you wouldn’t want him as an enemy – is one of the more distinguishable members of the vast cast of London gangland sadists, robbers, thugs and murderers who populate Tom Barling’s 1986 novel, primarily for being one of the few shown capable of feeling love.
Fictional characters can be likeable – or perhaps enviable – in spite of – perhaps because of – being greedy, vicious and ruthless. Pim just about qualifies, along with Barling’s antihero Charlie Dance, who nominatively determines that his mob’s rivals, along with a back-up crew of crooked cops, are led a not very merry one during the power struggle the novel elaborately describes. The women are molls, tarts with hearts or glamorous survivors. Pretty much all of the rest you can keep, preferably locked up.
The Smoke is set in the mid-Sixties and key protagonists are plainly based on the two most notorious gangs of the time, with the Troy brothers of the East End standing in for the Krays and the Harolds of Camberwell performing in fiction much as the Richardson siblings did in reality.
It all kicks off after a lump of building that was meant to fall on Charlie’s boss doesn’t quite finish him off, and all hell breaks loose on the cobbles of everywhere from Bethnal Green to Catford to Soho, the latter a cesspit of sex workers, enforcers, operators of nefarious entertainments, gays with GBH attitudes, seething suspicion and malicious chat.
The Londoner author’s cv, as described in the blurb, covers working in advertising, newspapers and TV and advertising production. His writing is skilled and vivid, often brilliantly evoking the grain and feel of the city of its time:
“Muffled against persistent drizzle, Charlie walked his heavy fishing-bag past lock-ups without earning a glance from a coster setting his pony between the shafts of his cart. Somebody hammered a car panel and a goods train rolled wagons of aggregate towards Shadwell Basin as Charlie climbed an iron ladder to the top of the viaduct. The down-line signal swung to red as he crossed the track to look down into Vallance Road.”
Needless to say, the fishing bag contains a gun.
Barling’s style is taut and honed, making his hard-boiled dialogue fizz, sometimes to the point of Pythonesque parody and is also a bit prolix for my taste. The meticulous detail of brawls, hackings, slashings and humiliations in particular render the long journey through The Smoke’s 555 pages pretty gruelling. The novel is impressive, though, in capturing a savage London criminal milieu that is too often romanticised, along with a chronically corrupt Met that real-life commissioner Robert Mark inherited in 1972 and got to grips with.
There were two follow-ups to The Smoke, neither of which I will be reading: the original has made its mark, its message has been received. Part of that is a reminder to nostalgists that the business of extreme gang-related violence in London is very far from new.
John Vane is a pen name used for London fiction, for writing about London fiction and for sketches of London life by OnLondon editor and publisher Dave Hill. Buy the John Vane London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to the John Vane Substack.