Radical drag

A quick time-out to recommend Jake Arnott's latest, Johnny Come Home. It's blurbed by David Bowie ("Whenever he's got a new book out I drop everything"), and I've now got a serious Bowie/Bolan fit coming on due to this novel's appealing early seventies London gay glam/terrorist scene (seriously, read the book, it's like a much more elegantly written version of James Ellroy crossed with Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist with a bit of Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto thrown in for luck). Also there is a very good sex scene in Chapter 17. When I ordered it from Amazon UK, I also splurged on the omnibus Long Firm Trilogy, I read them all one by one as they came out so it was strictly speaking unnecessary (more unnecessary than usual, I mean) but it seemed like a good thing to get and save for a rainy day.

(I feel about Arnott somewhat the way I feel about Mark Billingham: very, very good writers doing interesting and often quite beautifully executed versions of genre stuff. I found Arnott's first novel at the public library so that was particularly delightful, it is such a mixed bag what's there on the new books shelf that you really perk up when you get something that's actually high-quality writing: that's also where I first read Neil Gaiman, obviously I knew who he was but I hadn't really read Sandman to speak of & I picked up Neverwhere at random & was just spellbound, what a fun novel--and how delightfully unexpected to get it when it might as well have been something completely undistinguished to while away an hour or two.)

(I never watch movies, but if I had a copy of The Krays to hand I would be popping it into the DVD drive around now....)