I love it when I pick up a book and it just clicks, so much so that I find myself always reaching for it and not wanting to set it down. That's not to say I'm not enjoying my other current reads, as I am, but there's something about Cathi Unsworth's Bad Penny Blues that makes me want to keep going once I start. It seems to be a good, gritty, noir crime novel steeped in the atmosphere of the period, which in this case is late 1950s London. I really like it when an author makes you feel like you're there in the story, getting lost amongst the crowds, hearing the music and being part of the scene.
Cathi Unsworth began her writing career working for music and arts magazines and I think that seems to come through in this book. I get the sense that she is both socially and culturally savvy about the period--not someone who has just done a little research to sprinkle facts throughout the story. She has written several other books about this milieu, which I might just have to try and get my hands on, but first things first.
I like it when a novel written by a British author isn't Americanized. I'd rather try my luck getting the right meaning from unknown words and phrases rather than having it couched in American terms. It's amazing how much I've learned this way, and what I can't infer from my reading I can always look up. For instance a spiv is a petty criminal who deals in black market goods and a Teddy Boy is a young man of stylish dress typified by the style worn in the Edwardian period. Apparently they got their name from a newspaper headline, which shorted Edward to Teddy and the term Teddy Boy was born. I know this is a crime novel, but I love the social aspects of it as well, and I find social history endlessly fascinating.
So, my teaser today is from Bad Penny Blues. Pete Bradley is a new Police Constable who's looking to work his way up the ranks when he finds the body of a young woman in a field. Shortly after he's transferred to a new area and begins work as an undercover cop.
"Pete had wanted to experience something beyond the mundane beat of Chiswick and now he got it. The streets around Ladbroke Grove were like a frontier town in the Wild West, roughly divided into three territories. To his right, down Lancaster Road and up the Latimer Road was the area known as Notting Dale and it was from the little rows of cottages there that most of these Teddy Boys sprang. To his left, on the other side of Portobello Raod, were the roads owned by the Polish landlord Peter Rachman, whose houses overflowed with West Indians. Down the middle to Rachman's lands, joining Ladbroke Grove to Royal Oak, ran Westbourne Park Road. To its north, the immense coal and coke yard sprawled down the side of the Grand Union Canal, to the south a warren of streets inhabited by Irish.
There were other immigrant communities here-Spanish, Indians, a smattering of Portuguese and a subculture of writers and artists drawn by the cheap rents and shady, shifting atmosphere in the first place. But the Teds, the West Indians and the Irish, there were your fighters. To Pete's wide eyes it seemed that on every corner, at every hour of the day and night, there was a brawl taking place. Be it Teds jibing the equally dandified young coloured men, or a posse of drunks supporting each other while they took turns to vomit into the gutter, all the men here hunted in packs with the women screeching on their encouragement from the sidelines."
I'm getting a taste of 1950s London, and I think I wouldn't mind sticking around here for a while. Any suggestions for novels set in 1950s-1970s London anyone?