Novels and Short stories: Main Menu
Alison is a partner in a solicitors' practice, based in London. She has been representing Johnny who is severely, but habitually in debt, for nine months and their relationship - despite the inevitable professional barriers - is becoming increasingly personal. And since Johnny's knowledge of the law (and how to get around it) is on a par with her own, the professional barriers between them are quickly reduced to a pile of largely redundant paperwork (provided by the plaintiffs) on her office desk, sitting next to Johnny's five-page defence and laughable counter-claim.
Setting out to trap Johnny before she loses him to the other side, Alison is unaware of the extent to which he is trying to trap her, and the subterfuge he proposes lands her in a personal and professional quandry, her divided loyalties and sense of self-preservation battling with a repressed, though indomitable romantic streak. Meanwhile, Johnny has the plot to contend with...
Introducing Dave who is a freelance, self-appointed loan shark. He would never dream of lending his own money out; that would involve trusting people which, as Dave has learned from his own experience with himself, is inadvisable. Dave's trick is to help and encourage other people (usually small businesses) to incur hypothetical debts with their landlords so that, in his capacity as a middleman, he can collect them. Clever Dave. Until one day, his tidy little operation suddenly looks very messy. But this quickly becomes a side-issue when Dave's very sanity is threatened by a much bigger operation, which plays tricks not only with Dave's memory, but with the premises on which all business, and normality itself are founded.
In the late nineteen-nineties, anything vaguely out-of-the-ordinary is invariably classed as mad by those people with the self-confidence to consider themselves sane. Jan and Sam, who both live in Manchester's Whalley Range are the fickle, judgmental and unwittingly controversial product of the mixed-up, paranoid and xenophobic Britain which gave birth to them in the early Seventies.
Watching them misbehaving together, and in the company of two older men - Barry, a frustrated and marginalised madman and Tim, whose head is more demonstrably in-line but usually elsewhere - is both entertaining and, frequently, shocking. Assuming, of course, that being shocked is still allowed and, as a somehow quaint and outmodish frame of mind, not classed as mad.
GOODNIGHT, JANE
Part one: An insight into the mind of a sexually aware, introverted Catholic six-year-old in working-class Liverpool at the onset of the Seventies, his tug-of-love with the girlfriend of his dreams and the fears and self-curiosity which keep her at bay.
Part two: The perfect only child, the narrator is torn between his quest for an equally perfect soul-sister and precocious cravings for a sinful lover.
Set largely around Christmas time, and covering (chronologically) that same Christmas between the years of nineteen sixty-nine and seventy-five, this story is also a valuable social document, charting the changes in the Wavertree area of Liverpool in a world which had already all but disappeared a quarter of a century ago.
London, 2008. Computers are obsolescent due to the evolution of ESP, and spontaneity has become the only thing in life which seems to matter. Even the world's disaster-ridden history plays second fiddle to whatever comes by, next.
Axid has visited Earth before, but his memory, although apparently not implanted takes some time to fall into step with changes in the terrestrial environment with which it is presently engaged. One day, to be precise, but this is no time compared with the eternal split-second which finally grounds him.
The brief account of a WW1 soldier who drinks to forget throughout the twenties and, by a bizarre quirk of fate is ultimately defeated by an essentially happy event which in wartime would have presented no complications.
Once dubbed the Brighton of the North, Blackpool was still a plausible northwest UK holiday destination in the late sixties. Although the resort has since been morally bankrupted by the squeaky-clean continental packaged paradise offered by international airlines and home-based travel agents, its quaint and unassuming character remains intact. And the electric fairyland of the winter illuminations shall stay imprinted upon many thousands of childhood memories for years to come.
In Alan's case, the spell shall never wear off. Anita and Clare, meanwhile, although party to that same sixties' seaside magic, end up in completely different worlds. The story moves to Madrid for a while, but sunny Spain proves a poor substitute for the melancholic allure of rain-and-windswept Blackpool.