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    The London Sextet
    The London Sextet
    The London Sextet
    Ebook256 pages3 hours

    The London Sextet

    By Russell James

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    About this ebook

    This collection of six stories has been brought together for the first time within one book. Five are set in London, though the first brings some of his London characters out for a day’s shooting in the Cotswolds. (This is the story singled out in the Times as ‘a splendid country house shocker’.) In this book you’ll meet criminals and the women who wait for them, a missing daughter, London lowlife, faded aristocracy – and the only James story to feature a private detective. What more could you ask?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRussell James
    Release dateOct 21, 2011
    ISBN9781466068520
    The London Sextet
    Author

    Russell James

    Russell has been a published writer for some 25 years, is an ex-Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, and has written a dozen and a half novels in the crime and historical genres. He has also published various non-fiction works, including 4 illustrated biographical encyclopaedias: Great British Fictional Detectives and its companion work, Great British Fictional Villains, followed by the Pocket Guide to Victorian Writers & Poets, and its companion, the Pocket Guide to Victorian Artists & Their Models. His books include: IN A TOWN NEAR YOU (Prospero) THE CAPTAIN'S WARD (Prospero) AFTER SHE DROWNED (Prospero) STORIES I CAN'T TELL (with Maggie King) (Prospero) THE NEWLY DISCOVERED DIARIES OF DOCTOR KRISTAL (Prospero) EXIT 39 (Prospero) RAFAEL'S GOLD (Prospero) THE EXHIBITIONISTS (G-Press) POCKET GUIDE TO VICTORIAN ARTISTS & MODELS (Pen & Sword) POCKET GUIDE TO VICTORIAN WRITERS & POETS (Pen & Sword) GREAT BRITISH FICTIONAL VILLAINS (Pen & Sword) GREAT BRITISH FICTIONAL DETECTIVES (Pen & Sword) THE MAUD ALLAN AFFAIR (Pen & Sword) MY BULLET SWEETLY SINGS (Prospero) REQUIEM FOR A DAUGHTER (Prospero) NO ONE GETS HURT (Do Not Press) PICK ANY TITLE (Do Not Press) THE ANNEX (Five Star Mysteries) PAINTING IN THE DARK (Do Not Press) OH NO, NOT MY BABY (Do Not Press) COUNT ME OUT (Serpent's Tail) SLAUGHTER MUSIC (Alison & Busby) PAYBACK (Gollancz) DAYLIGHT (Gollancz) UNDERGROUND (Gollancz)

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      Book preview

      The London Sextet - Russell James

      THE LONDON SEXTET

      published by Russell James at Smashwords

      copyright Russell James 2011

      Full-length novels by this author include:

      Underground

      Daylight

      Payback

      Slaughter Music

      Count me Out

      Oh No, Not My Baby

      Painting in the Dark

      The Annex

      Pick Any Title

      No One Gets Hurt

      Requiem for a Daughter

      The Exhibitionists

      Smashwords Edition

      License Notes

      This ebook is for your own use only, and may not be given away or sold to other people. If you are reading this book but did not purchase it, be aware that you are infringing copyright. Please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s rights.

      Find more about the author from his website at

      russelljames.co.uk

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Brace Yourself

      (Guns at the country house shooting party)

      Interlude1

      A Piece of Cake

      (She’s waiting for him – but what with?)

      Interlude2

      No Debts Unpaid

      (Neither can escape their past)

      Interlude3

      The Break

      (Will their getaway get them away from her vengeful lover?)

      Interlude4

      Lost

      (Why did the daughter vanish?)

      Interlude5

      It Won’t Last

      (She’s far too young for him, they say)

      About The Author

      THE LONDON SEXTET

      Some stories by Russell James

      Never apologize, never explain. Yet when a hard-boiled crime writer tries something as fancy as an Introduction it surely demands an explanation - and who knows, maybe even an apology. So here goes.

      Britain's top crime writer, Ian Rankin, called me 'The Godfather of British Noir' so I'll forgive you for thinking I write hard boiled or tough guy adventure stories. And what is Noir? Why do we like to read it? Some folks opine that noir fiction is doom-laden and pessimistic, which doesn't sound a treat to read - but if we readers never took chances we'd never read tragedy. Even a thriller might disturb us. Yet we love tragedies and thrillers. We like to snuggle up somewhere safe and revel in someone else's misfortunes.

      Noir offers more. It may have humor, it'll certainly have action, and at the tale's black heart will be a character trapped in a situation from which there seems to be no escape. Some purists go so far as to say there must be no escape. The plight of a desperate man (it usually is a man) fighting in vain against the fates marks out noir fiction and gives it its unique savor. But it's not something new. Noir fiction is neither an American nor even a recent invention; it was not born out of Black Mask thrillers and 1930s B movies; it is a genre as old as literature itself. Think of ancient Greek tragedies. Think Jacobean tragedy.

      Noir today is more popular on screen than on the page - though as a writer I wish that were not true. Most of the writers we today consider as classic noir - Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Jim Thompson - died out of favor and broke. Most of today's successful noir writers blend their dark art into a more acceptable genre - typically a police procedural or PI mystery. Worse (for this so-called Noir Godfather) is that most publishers believe their customers will not buy noir. People will watch it or talk about it - they may even hunt down second-hand pulp classics - but they will not buy their noir books new. Publishers, for once, are right. Noir is a respected genre - even publishers respect it; they use 'noir' as an adjective to promote new books - and noir books get reviewed by major critics. But, insist the publishers, those punters will not buy noir books. We don't know why that is, say the publishers - we think we know what people buy, but we have to admit we don't know why. Perhaps people imagine noir to be gloomy, depressing reading - but it's not. Noir is like the blues. As therapeutic as the blues. A good tragedy, as the ancient Greeks knew, uplifts the soul.

      But the typical publisher's accountant can't put a price on a soul. Accountants - and the publisher's sales department - love PI tales and police procedurals. They love 'em because that kind of book can be developed into a series, and publishers love series because series sell. It's not easy to write a noir series. As the series continues, the writer will inevitably soften towards the characters, softening the characters' hard hearts and making the bad guys lovable. Even the excellent Patricia Highsmith softened towards Ripley - a nasty and cowardly psychopath in book one, but an increasingly respectable middle class professional in later titles. The pseudonymous Richard Stark (another fine writer) couldn't stop us getting to know and understand his deliberately blank, amoral villain/hero as the Stark books progressed. Most important of all: though a series hero cannot die, a noir hero may well die. It is the probability of his death that underlines the noir nature of the story.

      That's why I do not write series. Each of my books stands alone, and by the end of the book the hero may not stand at all. A Russell James book is a one-off, with a one-off hero, and there's no reason he or she should survive. Leading characters - not necessarily the hero - die in every one of my books (except in the deliberately lighter Pick Any Title). I am a writer of dark stories. I am not writing The Perils of Pauline. In one of my books if a woman were ever strapped to the rails it is unlikely the hero would arrive to save her. He'd certainly not arrive in the nick of time. Most probably he'd get there two minutes late.

      I said I write dark stories - not gloomy and not depressing, but dark. Does that mean I splatter the text with sex and violence? I do not. I really don't Although I'm known as a noir writer, new readers are sometimes surprised to find there are shorter descriptions of sex and violent acts in my stories than in many mainstream titles. I'm not alone. Elmore Leonard says he hates to give - and therefore he doesn't give - lingering descriptions of murder. Leonard will say 'He shot him' in the same way that Shakespeare or a Jacobean writer says 'They put out his eyes'. The awful finality of the words is violence enough. Like Leonard, I prefer the flatness of 'He shot him' to a two-age pathology report. Sex and violence in my books gain their impact not from the acts themselves (climactic as they may be) but from the build-up, while writers who turn out pornographic fiction, on the other well-used hand, drench their readers with endless, stroke by stroke descriptions of acts that are less interesting to read than to perform.

      I like the build-up, the scene-setting. Think of a magician's trick, which reaches its climax when he pulls a rabbit from the hat - though the rabbit is not the most important element in the trick. (Pulling it out of nowhere, unexpectedly, is the crux.) Magicians who stand out are the ones who surround their tricks with impressive business. I remember David Blaine taking ten minutes to deliver what was, in truth, little more than the old vanish a coin and make it reappear in a closed container trick. His audience was astounded and delighted. No doubt a few magicians watching grumbled 'Anyone can do that' - but anyone can't do it, that's the point. Blaine is a consummate performer. He can take an old trick and make it shine like new. Similarly, we writers repeat our own repertoires of dusty tricks, and the consummate among us make old routines shine like new.

      'He shot him' may not be enough. Starting in the late twentieth century many a bizarre death was meted out by fiction's serial killers (serial killers had become the fashion) but macabre deaths were nothing new. Back in the Golden Age, death came (on the page) via traceless poisons and curious contrivances such as Miss Sayers' chiming bells and Conan Doyle's luminescent hound. Earlier, much earlier, back in the days of ancient Greece, dramatic fiction dressed up the banality of death with extraordinary mechanics and methodologies. Vivid as these pictures were, what remained in the memory were seldom the circumstances of death but the circumstances around the death: what led up to the death and ideally, why it was unavoidable - or better, how death could have been avoided if someone had taken the one simple step they didn't take. The tragedy of Prometheus is less about his agony, chained to a rock and having his liver torn out by vultures, than it is about the great quarrel he had with Zeus, the conflicting vanities, the refusal to compromise. It is a story rooted in violence, despotism and defiance, and it remains relevant today as a parable of resistance by a strong individual against a fascist state. A mere pornographer of violence could have had a field day with descriptions of Prometheus in his corporeal agony - but without the tale's intellectual and moral background it would hardly be worth setting in type.

      Perhaps I'm wrong in this. Perhaps such a story, stripped to its garish bird-pecked bones, would make a sensationalist success today; a triumph this year, forgotten next. I am wrong, surely: would the original story really have been remembered, were it not for its shocking violence? An ancient Greek tragedy in which Prometheus and Zeus merely ranted at each other about the conflicting duties of lord and subject is a tale that would have been lost along with so many other Greek tragedies: a hit one season, revived a few years later, only to be consigned to the dry dust of oblivion. It was their violence that brought those tragedies alive.

      My own books are always about criminals, and practically all of my criminals - as in real life - feel they have to enforce their will by actual or threatened violence. To describe their crimes and lives I do not ignore the violence - but I am aware of my responsibility. I do not give lingering descriptions of violent acts. Any reader who gets off on the violence in a Russell James story is a reader whose head was full of violent thoughts before they turned to my white pages. Such a reader could get off as easily on Little Red Riding Hood (implied cannibalism, paedophilia, bloody revenge and super-bulimic regurgitation - nemesis through emesis, if you will). Such a reader could get off on half the fairy tales we know - even on the bible, surely one of the most remorselessly violent books currently in print. Should that book be banned?

      I find it curious, looking back over what I've just written, that I've said so much about sex and violence - when there's comparatively little of it in my stories. Yet being called the 'Godfather of British Noir' compels me, all too often, to defend my tales against the charge that I trade in those vices. I do not. My stories, in fact, are less hard boiled than my reputation suggests. Two of the stories in this book contain no violence at all. So congratulations to you, dear reader -I mean those words: anyone who has stayed with me this far is automatically a dear reader - congratulations on bucking the trend. Stay with your instinct. Stay with me. Stay with the critics. 'Surely the best of Britain's darker crime writers' said London's Times. 'An acknowledged British master of hard-edged crime' agreed Britain's big-selling Mail on Sunday. American papers praise me too - check the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, check the glowing reviews in Publishers Weekly, Mostly Murder and Mystery News. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Crime Fiction says I turn out 'some of the best crime fiction being written today'. But enough already. I'm not here to sell myself. I am trying, in this introduction and in the linking pieces between the stories, to share with you a little of what makes a writer tick, and to explain perhaps how each particular story came mewling and puking into this wicked world. One more quote, though, I will allow myself. When this first story, Brace Yourself, appeared in a characteristically yellow and black Victor Gollancz volume called Crime Yellow (and in paperback, called New Crimes) the Times review picked out 'a splendid country house shocker from Russell James'. Well, here it is again. I hope you enjoy it.

      _____________________________________

      BRACE YOURSELF

      Patterson lets the gun dangle from his hand. You can see he doesn't know how to carry the thing. He lets it trail beside his leg, the barrel inches from his ankles. Occasionally he uses the gun to move wet undergrowth aside. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw mud on the end of the barrel, because you know that Patterson is the kind of man who has rarely seen a gun, let alone carried one.

      Look at his clothes: jeans, denim jeans - the last thing to wear when tramping through damp woodland. They absorb water from the bushes and retain moisture. Patterson also wears black galoshes and a brown tweed jacket. Under the jacket he wears a navy wool pullover. A big pullover. His jacket has been forced over it and looks tight across the shoulders. His arms move stiffly.

      He shouldn't be here.

      *

      Fenner knew that the moment he saw him. Patterson had crunched his green Ford to a halt behind Fenner's Jag on the gravel in front of the house, had heaved his large body out of the Ford and marched across the path with the engine left running. Obviously he realized he couldn't park it at the foot of the steps. He wanted instructions, like a tradesman who should have driven round to the back. Fenner waited for Leighton to tell him so.

      But he didn't. Leighton greeted Patterson by name - he was not effusive about it, but not hostile either. Glad you found us, Patterson. Decent journey?

      Bit of a grind. Roadworks on the motorway.

      Leighton turned to Fenner: Michael Patterson, he said. Barry Fenner. Another guest.

      Fenner eyed the man with interest. Patterson, eh?

      The man nodded. Good to meet yer.

      How do you do?

      But Fenner made no move to shake hands with Patterson. He and Leighton were at the top of the wide stone steps, Patterson on the gravel below. Fenner - thin, aesthetically drawn, pale blond hair - wore a light gray suit. Patterson - dark haired, large and awkward - wore shirt and slacks. A vivid tie hung loosely around his neck and his shirt was unbuttoned, too small at the collar. One side had become untucked from his trousers. Squinting up at the two men on the steps, Patterson fumbled in his pocket for a pair of spectacles, and once he'd put them on he said, That's better.

      Leighton smiled. You can switch the engine off, you know. I'll have someone move your car just as soon as they've brought your luggage in. Leave the key inside.

      Right.

      As Patterson turned back to his car, Fenner glanced at his host for some sign of his reaction - a conspiratorial wink perhaps - but John Leighton's face retained its customary polite expression. Fenner studied him openly. Leighton's dark hair seemed a little thinner than when they'd last met. Perhaps the afternoon sunlight, glaring onto Leighton's black hair, showed how each strand had been flattened into submission with water, brush and comb. Leighton looked older today. People should age gradually. Fenner had read somewhere that every cell in the human body dies and is replaced within a space of seven years, so that before any decade is out, one has become an entirely different person. If ageing should be gradual, it seemed that Leighton had aged seven years in this last month. Cells were dying on his skin. It was as if he'd reached his fortieth birthday and had turned off the switch.

      He seemed thinner too.

      *

      Ahead of the others in the wet undergrowth, John Leighton bites his lip. A flicker of anxiety crosses his face, but he hides it. In his Barbour jacket and plus fours he looks less thin than he did yesterday - he looks wiry, quite tough, in fact. He stands with feet planted firmly apart, legs warmly encased in leather-lined Le Chameau boots, neat Habicht binoculars slung loose around his neck, and he carries a boxlock Holland and Holland Cavalier shotgun in one hand. Two dogs pant in the dewy air as they stand patiently beside him. Leighton is boss.

      *

      Here comes another car. Would you like to pop up to your room?

      Leighton's tone told Fenner not to wait with him on the steps. It underlined whose house this was, whose guests, whose weekend, and said that Leighton wished to greet his guests alone.

      Fenner shrugged. He had no wish to linger at the top of these cold steps, grinning aimlessly into space while Leighton shook hands and prattled to each new visitor. It was dull enough talking to Leighton, let alone to his wretched guests. He went inside.

      Alone, John Leighton blinked against low sunlight. Rattling towards the house along the tree-lined drive came a battered Land Rover. Harriet Henderson. Leighton hoped she had not brought dogs with her. She bred the things - made money from doing so, apparently. He had had to speak to her about it once, when she had tried to sell dogs at his dinner table. Leighton didn't know whether she sold dogs as a pastime or whether she needed the extra money - one did not ask. Harriet always wore the same old clothes, drove the same old Land Rover - not that that meant anything. Families with money did not trouble to flaunt the fact.

      The Hendersons and Leightons had been neighbours for two hundred years. By now, most of the Hendersons had moved away - had married badly, died, that sort of thing. Harriet was virtually the only one left. She rode to hounds, of course, appeared at the odd gymkhana, but little else. The Hendersons were part of the countryside around here.

      Whereas Fenner… Where had he come from? One could not be sure about Barry Fenner's background. A London man: that was written in every vein of him. Smart suits, smart car, smart attitudes. When Fenner came down last time - when was it, three weekends ago? - he had tried to impress Emily with highfalutin talk of negotiable securities, insider deals. Perhaps she was impressed. All Leighton knew was that when he brought the conversation round to include a couple of items from his own diminishing portfolio, the chap had grown suddenly evasive - as if he'd been delivering lines from a speech he had rehearsed, and he couldn't leave his script. He had floundered. He couldn't improvise. Surprising, that. You'd have expected a chap like Fenner to be quick witted.

      Mind you, thought Leighton, as Harriet's muddy Land Rover came out from beneath the trees onto his gravel forecourt, if Fenner had been a stockbroker

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