Manchester Slingback
by Nicholas Blincoe

I think it was the novelist L.P.Hartley who wrote in his celebrated novel, The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." And nothing could be truer for Jake Powell and the seedy world he left behind him when he deserted the rain-soaked urban decay of Manchester for London's bright lights fifteen years earlier. He discarded his old identity and began a new life, getting married and working as the respectable manager of a fashionable casino in the heart of the capital. But who a person is and what he is comes as a result of where he has been and what he has done. This is a simple equation that Jake cannot escape, particularly when the past catches up with him in the shape of the brusque, tenacious copper, DI Davey Greene.

One of Jake's acquaintances from the past, Kevin Donnelly, a pychotic rent-boy, has been killed and brutally mutilated, Mafia-style. Donnelly is not the first casualty amongst Jake's friends: fifteen years earlier, his best mate, Johnny was found murdered, the remains of his hacked body discovered on a desolate Pennine moor. Reluctantly, Jake accompanies DI Green back to the North in an endeavour to shed some light on the grisly murders.

This is a skillfully constructed novel where the parallel universes of past and present interlock in fast-moving, over-lapping chapters. We discover that Jake was a small-time hustler working the gay scene in Manchester back in '81. This was the post-punk era of new-romantic decadence and the nihilistic joy- boys and girls who danced in an amphetamine haze to the sounds of Bowie and Iggy Pop: a sleazy, morally suffocating world of dope, sex, violence and petty crime. Layer by layer, this gripping yarn unravels a sordid, harrowing tale that encompasses ritual sexual abuse and video porn. Blincoe pulls no punches in the grim, explicitly graphic accounts of pederastic sexual encounters. Gulp!

Jake is guilt-ridden, blaming himself for Johnny's death. But ultimately, he finds redemption by retracing his steps, re-visiting his old haunts (where everything has changed beyond recognition) and eventually confronting the killer. The author's bleak dissection of the human condition is tempered by pathos and humanity. Blincoe's characters are three-dimensional, substantive and ultimately believable. He expertly captures the essence of the early eighties with its hedonistic, androdgynous culture and 'no future' philosophy.

If all this sounds a tad too grim, Blincoe develops a nice line in dark, ironical humour in this novel of redemption and payback.

Nicholas Blincoe has carved out his own unique niche in British crime fiction. His writing, deemed as "new wave" by some observers, is steeped in popular culture and the idioms of street slang. He's regarded as hip right now but that's never a good reason for reading or doing anything. As Manchester Slingback illustrates, Blincoe's abilities as a writer extend far beyond any shallow notions of hipness that may temporarily endear him to the trendy Sunday supplement crowd. Unfortunately, the existence of literary sub-genres and the consequent ghettoisation of crime-fiction may prevent a wider public appreciation of Blincoe's undoubted talents. Blincoe is a major British writer. It would be tantamount to a crime to ignore this crucial book.

Reviewed by Charles Waring