Blincoe hit the floor running with Acid Casuals, his highly acclaimed debut. A '90's update of Ted Lewis's classic Jack's Return Home (a.k.a Get Carter) Crime Time gave it four stars. A tough act to follow but Blincoe hasn't shirked his responsibilities. Having ditched Frank 'Ballistic' Ball, a one time London villain, Susan Ball heads to Soho to set up a restaurant with the help of Frank's laundered millions. Choosing Hogie and Cheb as her cook and maitré d may not have been a good idea given their propensity to extreme substance abuse and credit card fraud. Travelling down to London they have bought a lot of baggage with them, including Mannie and his soap star sister Jools. Mannie is a failed drug dealer who gets so stoned he keeps forgetting where he stashed his score. Naz is also along for the ride since Mannie owes him for the lost drugs. For good measure, Frank and Susan's son, Callum, has gone missing with a shit-load of cocaine.
As Joe Bob Briggs says "some people know how to make sequels and some people don't." As with Acid Casuals the plot is largely, although not entirely, irrelevant. A few pounds of cocaine act as a handy McGuffin but the laughs, violence, sex and drugs are what its all about. Susan reprises the wonderful Estela from Acid Casuals, Cheb has more than a passing similarity to Junk and Naz takes up where Amjad the taxi driver left off. Moving the action to London gives Blincoe the opportunity to pit one generation of gangsters with another - a sort of Sweeney vs Acid House.
This is a London which is "rank, blackened and greasy" (by 'eck, it's grim down south). Blincoe writes about the "dead space in-between," a place unhinged and peopled by those who "loved trouble as much as the next chaos merchant." As always, reading Blincoe is an education. There is a well worked discourse on the evils of "wheatie goodness" versus civilisations based on corn which ends up with one character being disembowelled. He also knows how to handle the action. One shootout starts as a diversionary tactic to get rid of a body but quickly escalates into a mini war with Naz masquerading as a gang of Jamaicans. The punchline has the body being nailed down in a luggage compartment of a coach. You'll have to read the book to work this one out but the whole scene is funny, believable and a testament to Blincoe's assured style.
The Jello Salad of the title is about how unpredictable life can be. More than that it hints at how subservient Blincoe is. As it said in The Observer recently "drug dealers...are the new pop stars". Blincoe is telling us something about the '90's generation and in getting us to laugh about it he may be making the most serious comment of all.
The book's conclusion is at one and the same time inevitable and confused. Introducing the notions of redemption, self-sacrifice and epic love may just be attempting too much. However Blincoe's ability to go totally OTT may mark him out as the new Mark Timlin.
Fast, funny and ferocious this is great stuff, however, and I didn't mention Tarantino once (...oh damn).
