What Da Cover Says: This powerful collection of stories takes you to London’s drinking dens, backstreets and shadowy housing estates where coppers, criminals and the plain hard-done-by are faced with all life can throw at them.
A teenager is disillusioned when the friend he idolizes is guilty of a sick, horrific crime – when they fall out he’s forced to take part in his escapades. A moonlighting policeman is sent to blackmail a TV soap starlet; proceedings take a twist when she turns the tables and before long bullets are flying. A gangster dreaming of a world away from his domineering boss stabs a stranger in a street confrontation, an action with consequences more hellish than he could have imagined…
What I Says: It’s always nice when you pick up a book where you know virtually nothing about it and it turns out you have something very good in your hands. What a reader needs when trying an unknown author is a strong opening to draw you in, the first story in Smile With Knife is Tottenham Forever and from the first paragraph I knew I was on to a winner, the police smashing down a door in a drug raid and our narrator is the criminal who has zero respect for the police…already I was wondering who I was going to be siding with.
This collection of short stories feels like a confessional, you get a sense of the characters being interviewed, explaining their lives and how they came to be sat in front of you recounting their violent history. Most of the characters come across as being shameful of their past acts, they are not asking for forgiveness but have a desperation for you to see their side of things, how past events inevitably led to how it all played out, a real hopelessness to them being controlled by societies expectations. The book is crammed with violent murders, drugs, gang warfare, corrupt cops and violent husbands and as soon as you get under the skin of the criminal you can see how tragic it all is, there were more moving scenes than I was expecting.
The title story was my favourite, you get to witness the cops interrogating a man and it is obvious from the start that he is a broken man (before they got to him) and it is quite shocking how the story plays out. Another story worthy of a mention is The Meat Trade, great main character going into detail about his job for the mob, not gonna tell you what that is here but from the title you can have a good guess. There is a lot of urban language from the streets of London and it was remarkably easy to get into the swing of things, being a fan of films like Lock, Stock and two Smoking Barrels it turns out this was the perfect book for me. Well written and not a single weakness in the best bit of transgressive fiction I’ve come across in a few years. Highly recommended.
Gnome Appreciation Society 