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Jake ArnottJake Arnott
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Critical perspective
BiographyJake Arnott was born in Buckinghamshire, England in 1961. His novel, The Long Firm, the story of the charismatic gangster Harry Starks, was published in 1999 to critical acclaim and commercial success and was subsequently adapted as a major BBC drama serial. Along with He Kills Coppers (2001), and truecrime (2003) his first three books form a noir trilogy that spans the last four decades of the twentieth century.
His fourth novel, Johnny Come Home (2006), takes place in the summer of 1972 amidst the world of glam-rock and radical politics. His latest book, The Devil’s Paintbrush (2009), set in Paris in 1903, concerns the fall from grace of the British Empire hero, Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald in a shocking scandal and examines imperialism, sexuality and the nature of belief.
Jake Arnott lives in London.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction
BibliographyThe Long Firm Sceptre, 1999 He Kills Coppers Hodder & Stoughton, 2001 truecrime Sceptre, 2003 Johnny Come Home Sceptre, 2006 The Devil's Paintbrush Sceptre, 2009
Critical Perspective‘"You know the song, don’t you? “There’s no business like show business”’. Harry gets the Ethel Merman intonation just right as he heats up a poker in the gas burner …. ‘Well what if there was a business like show business. Like show business. You know?’ We are overhearing gangster Harry Starks, who is about to begin torturing his ex-rent boy lover, at the start of Jake Arnott’s compelling crime fiction, The Long Firm (1999). This connection between the worlds of showbiz and London’s gangland, from the early 1960s to the 1990s, is crucial to Arnott’s highly acclaimed trilogy, which continues with He Kills Coppers (2001) and truecrime (2003). Featuring real-life villains and celebrities alongside their fictional counterparts, with bent coppers, cynical tabloid journalists and politicians on the take all mixed together, they tell the social history of the period in a very entertaining way. What also makes them distinctive is that they view this social history from a perspective of ‘deviance’ from the mainstream – most clearly in the homosexuality of their main protagonists – while also fulfilling the demands of the crime thriller with pace, wit and style. As readers we enjoy the vicarious pleasures of witnessing scenes of glamour and squalor alternately, visiting criminals’ hideouts, police operations, prisons, Fleet Street, Soho strip clubs and male ‘Meat Racks’. We watch pop music emerging in the 1960s, the drug and hippy culture, then the punks, skinhead groups and the rave scene, continually alerted to changing fashions, in dangerous, ‘lairy’ environments where ‘every detail of style spelt violence’.
Some reviewers have characterized Arnott’s fiction with stereotyping phrases such as ‘Gangster Chic’ or ‘Geezer Chic’, while The New Statesman ambiguously called it ‘pulp fiction so polished as to be immaculate’. Agreed, it can be seen as part of a nostalgic – and highly commercial - revival of interest in ‘the Swinging Sixties’, and in the mythologizing of its criminal underworld. This is a process evident in such recent British movies as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and further back, to The Long Good Friday and Get Carter. In Arnott’s fiction, the texture goes deeper than nostalgia; alongside the lingo of ‘faces’, ‘clipping’, and con tricks goes snatches of the gay language ‘polari’. The Kray Twins, and other figures from the era take their places alongside Arnott’s great creation, Soho club boss Harry Starks. A psychopath with ‘threatening charisma’, he is a mother’s boy at home and a vicious racketeer abroad; a man whose black moods and odd use of prison sociology-speak dominates others, from fellow gangsters to journalists and peers. He is a social climber, proud of photographs showing him with celebrities such as boxer Sonny Liston and Tom Driberg (an M.P. shown participating in a rent boy orgy). He also insists on an old-fashioned sense of fashion and sexual identity, claiming ‘I’m homosexual but I’m not gay’.
Theatricality is a constant theme. Following Harry around, we too are introduced to fading singers Judy Garland, Dorothy Squires, Johnny Ray; we visit the shotgun-toting record producer Joe Meek, and hear gossip about Larry Parnes and Brian Epstein. Arnott undeniably bases some characters on originals that readers are invited to identify; neurotic radio comedian Gerald Wileman (star of ‘How’s Your Father’) for instance suggests the late great Kenneth Williams, while Lord Teddy Thursby’s career as corrupt politician, homosexual socialite and right-wing newspaper pundit is also identifiable. Best of all of these fact-and-fiction composites is Ruby Ryder, who develops during the course of the novels from busty blonde Rank starlet and gangster’s wife to television soap opera queen. Indeed, Arnott’s books often grab the reader’s attention in cinematic or televisual ways. After its opening scene, The Long Firm (currently being turned into a BBC television series) flashes back to the first meeting between Harry Starks and rent boy Terry, in ‘The Casbah Lounge’ amidst ‘Earl’s Court queens with cheap polari sophistication’. Its plot then unfolds, with business frauds and a failed jewel raid at ‘Thiefrow’ airport taking place as well as the murder of a rent boy and the inevitable Establishment and police cover-up. The five sections are narrated by various characters, such as drug-taking ‘second-rate thug’ Jack the Hat McVitie, destined to end up as a victim of the Krays. Of most significance to the trilogy are the revelations in Teddy Thursby’s diaries (later stolen by crime journalist and ghost writer Tony Meehan). During 1964, the extracts have glimpses of Thursby’s gay ‘porn flicks’ and orgies, his involvement with a corrupt officer and their subsequent blackmail by Starks. Other significant characters are introduced, including Simon Beardsley, pop music manager and drug dealer; while actress Ruby marries jailed thief Eddie Doyle, and has a risky affair with one of Starks’ young men.
In He Kills Coppers, the plot follows England’s football World Cup summer during 1966, though it also moves forward to the Thatcher era of Poll Tax riots and the Greenham Common peace camp. This time the focus is as much on the police as on the criminals, weighing the morality of killer and ex-soldier Billy Porter on the run, against the corruption of his pursuers. Young policeman Frank Taylor becomes entangled by pay offs within the Flying Squad, then by guilt as he gets his partner transferred with fatal consequences. Meanwhile, Tony Meehan of the Sunday Illustrated (a vehicle for some funny observations of tabloid cynicism) is at large in the homosexual underworld, his failed novelistic ambitions counter-pointed by an obsession with strangulation. London itself is shown being altered, by drugs and ‘beautiful people’. By 1985, society has changed again, to confrontation between the police and peace campaigners, and ‘working class hero’ Billy Porter is finally caught up with.
At the end of The Long Firm, ‘Big Jock’ had been shot dead at his Spanish villa, an unsolved murder that animates the plot of truecrime. The gangster’s actress daughter Julie uses the making of a British gangster movie (‘Scrapyard Bulldog’), as a means of luring out Harry Starks, ‘the last of the Old School’. She becomes involved with now-veteran villain Eddie Doyle, and Meehan is after his own literary redemption, ‘one more chance to write a proper book’. When Eddie spots Starks at Ronnie Kray’s funeral, his pursuit – and the money Doyle believes he’s owed – is set in motion. The showbiz success of Essex hoodlum ‘Geezer Gaz’ also throws a satirical light on the film industry, amidst the 1990s pop culture of raves, super clubs, and Ecstasy. Though Arnott is a crime novelist, his works cast a sharp eye upon Britain’s post-war social history, fictionalizing its high and low life from ‘outsider’ perspectives. But they are above all really entertaining books, which have attracted their own celebrity admirers, notably rock star David Bowie, who has aptly called them ‘pure gangland bliss’.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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