Just Another Angel Read online

  Title Page

  JUST ANOTHER ANGEL

  Mike Ripley

  Publisher Information

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn,

  Denbighshire, LL19 9SH

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited 2010

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Just Another Angel © 1988, 2006 Mike Ripley

  Introduction © 2006 Mike Ripley

  Cover by Gwyn Jeffers, David J Howe

  Content Version: 1.0

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  For three women: Alyson, who never doubted, Beth and Ada Sylvia. And two men: John Grant and Gwyn Lawrence, who inspired in very different ways.

  Author’s Introduction

  It was 1987 and the country was in the grip of Thatcherism. Greed was good, and all anyone could talk about was their latest pay rise or bonus or where the next BMW was coming from. Business and the Stock Exchange were facing an electronic revolution, whether they knew it or not. It was the era of ‘Loadsamoney’ and champagne by the pint; and, as is always the case when times are good economically, the music was shite.

  I worked for a trade association called the Brewers’ Society (in those days, there actually was a British brewing industry), fending off accusations about monopolies and cartels with one hand and fighting for longer pub opening hours with the other.

  It sounds like a saga of old, told by men of the north around campfires now, but in 1987, pubs in Britain closed between (roughly) 2.30 pm and 6.00 pm, and had done since DORA – the Defence of the Realm Act – was passed in 1915 during World War I.

  I commuted daily by train from Colchester in Essex, often sitting with a neighbour from my village, Dr John Grant, who worked at the School of Tropical Medicine but was better known as Jonathan Gash, the author of the Lovejoy crime novels.

  Up until this point, I had not actually read many crime novels or ‘detective stories’. I much preferred action thrillers or spy novels, but there were three notable exceptions to this rule. I had discovered Raymond Chandler at the age of about 12 (and duly had my breath taken completely away); and then, aged about 17 and living in Cambridge, I had been introduced by a University don (philosophy professor Tim Smiley if we’re naming guilty parties) to the tongue-in-cheek detective stories of Michael Innes and the wonderful East Anglian tales of Margery Allingham. (Oddly enough, I was eventually to settle in an Essex village almost equidistant from the homes of Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers.)

  In 1987, I was re-reading my collection of Margery Allingham novels on the daily commute, and one day I was praising the virtues of her classic Tiger In The Smoke to my long-suffering companion John Grant, who was trying to concentrate on some medical journal or other.

  Tiger in the Smoke was published in the year I was born, 1952, but was an almost photographic snapshot of life in England in 1950/51. Not 1948 and certainly not 1953 (the year the first James Bond book appeared). But it wonderfully caught the mood of a small slice of time when Britain was changing, licking its wounds after a war and adapting to a welfare state, a crumbling class system, a loss of Empire, a lack of world role. All these pressures and concerns were reflected in Allingham’s book, which also featured a cracker of a villain in the psychopath Jack Havoc. Yes, it’s that good.

  Gleefully I suggested to John Grant that somebody should use the crime novel just like Allingham did, to catalogue the social mores and changes that were happening in 1987, satirising the overwhelming culture of greed and materialism that we were experiencing.

  Having listened politely to this rant for about ten minutes, John smiled at me and said: ‘Well, why don’t you get off your fat arse and do it then?’

  Always being one to do what the doctor ordered, I set about it that very night on an old 1920s Universal typewriter that had once belonged to the Press Association. This was going to be a modern London novel, populated by characters I had known at university or met in various pubs. (I went to a lot of pubs in the course of my work.)

  I typed ‘CHAPTER ONE’ top and centre of a piece of A4 and put a ‘1’ in the corner. When I had filled the page, I took it out of the typewriter and read it through.

  It was 300+ words of utterly pretentious, turgid crap.

  I reached for another sheet of paper, thinking there must be another way.

  And then I remembered Tom Sharpe, who had taught me Russian history years before at Cambridge College of Arts & Technology. In the year he taught me, Tom’s first novel came out and was an instant and huge hit. Riotous Assembly was basically Tom venting his spleen on the apartheid regime in South Africa, which had imprisoned and eventually expelled him for his radically humane views. After many attempts to write a play about his experiences there, Tom had been persuaded by a friend to write a novel, but (or so the story went) the only way he could do it was through savage black humour. He made it savage and he made it very funny, and his career as a great comic novelist was launched.

  I thought that was what I had to do. Make it funny, play it as farce.

  Page 1 became page 21 before I really knew what I was doing, and certainly before I had any idea of a coherent plot, but I was underway. After about a week, I was beginning to enjoy the process of writing, using an A4 pad of lined paper and a felt-tip pen on daily train journeys and then typing up the manuscript in the evening. (In those days, you could get a seat at a table on the train and there was a bar in the evenings and you could smoke. Who couldn’t write a novel under those conditions?)

  I found a name for my hero: Roy Angel. From somewhere in the depths of memory, I remembered the name Ray Angel, who I think had been a BBC cameraman on Doctor Who. For some reason, the name had stuck with me, but I preferred Roy to Ray, and from that came Fitzroy and, simply because I couldn’t resist it, Fitzroy Maclean after Sir Fitzroy, the soldier and author of the amazing Eastern Approaches.

  The title came from a line in a Dire Straits song, and it never occurred to me that the first book featuring Angel should not really be called Just Another …, mainly because I had no idea there would ever be a second.

  Angel himself was based on an old friend from university days; I simply added the London location, my love of jazz trumpet-playing and my fondness for cats. Legal reasons prevent me from identifying him further. The de-licensed London taxi came from another fellow student at university, who had bought one long before actors and rock stars thought it cool to own one. A failing memory prevents me from identifying him, but I think he was called Simon.

  In the spring of 1987, my wife Alyson announced that she was pregnant and would be giving up her Civil Service job in the summer. Once the initial panic had subsided, I realised that the loss of her income would be quite a blow to us and became determined to finish my masterpiece before the baby arrived.

  I almost made it. Our first daughter arrived on 23 September, and I typed those magic words ‘The End’ about a week later.

  After my paternity leave (I was allowed two days off work) and the great British hurricane of that year, I took th
e typed manuscript into my office in Portman Square (now a sadly boarded-up and neglected building without a hint of a blue plaque) and asked one of the very nice girls who worked in our post room if she could make some photocopies for me. She made four, and copies were despatched with a covering letter to the three publishers I had had my eye on, though I cannot say I had conducted any systematic market research: I had simply looked on my bookshelves at home and randomly selected Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Hodder & Stoughton.

  I was having lunch with one of the senior secretaries at work and telling the story of my first novel, when she asked if I had tried the publisher Collins, as it was a good company and she had once worked for the MD, a man called Winkleman. And anyway, it wasn’t far away, just down Oxford Street, round at 8 Grafton Street.

  I thought: why not? I had an extra copy of the manuscript and a large jiffy bag. Hopping on a bus, I found Grafton Street and the glass-fronted London headquarters of Collins Crime Club. It was still lunch time and people were flooding out of the building, leaving a solitary receptionist on the desk. Through the big glass windows, I watched her settle down to eat a sandwich and use the switchboard to phone a few friends, as receptionists usually do in office dead time. I could even see her slip off her shoes when she thought everyone who was going to lunch had gone.

  From a phone box across the street, I rang the Collins number I had looked up before leaving my office and watched her answer my call.

  ‘I’ve got a package for you,’ I said, ‘but I can’t make out the instructions properly. Do you have a Mr Winkleman there?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said helpfully, and then spelt it out. ‘Don’t worry, everybody gets it wrong. And his first name is Barry.’

  ‘Thanks, love, I’ll drop it round,’ I said, and hung up. Then I wrote ‘BY HAND’ on the jiffy bag I was holding and marched confidently across Grafton Street.

  As luck would have it – and it is better to be lucky than good – a black London cab pulled up right in front of the office steps. It was empty, probably waiting for a booking, but it looked as if I had just got out of it on an important errand to deliver a package.

  I handed the jiffy bag to the receptionist, who was on the phone, to her mother I suspect, and said ‘Parcel for Mr Winkleman, but you have to sign for it,’ as I’d seen countless messengers do at my office. Without pausing in her phone conversation, the receptionist took the jiffy bag, dropped it into a wire basket in-tray and scribbled her name on the piece of paper I was holding out. I thanked her and hurried out.

  She had signed the back of a Brewers’ Society luncheon voucher, and I was to treasure it for years.

  This was lunchtime on, say, a Tuesday in early October. The very next morning, Wednesday, I received through the post at home a formal pre-printed card saying ‘The Managing Director was in receipt of your manuscript,’ and that it would be receiving his attention, blah-blah-blah.

  Still, it was more than I had got from the other three publishers.

  Then, the day after, Thursday, I got a letter from Barry Winkleman’s secretary saying that ‘as the manuscript looked like crime fiction’ (which was news to me) the Managing Director had passed it on to the Crime Editor.

  Even then, in my innocent days, I realised this was a result. If the Crime Editor gets a manuscript for the MD, what does she do? She reads it.

  Eight days later, I signed a contract with Collins at the request of their Crime Editor, the legendary Elizabeth Walter, who summoned me to a meeting in Grafton Street, where her very first words (even before ‘Hello’) were ‘How many more can you do?’

  (I said, ‘Three, then I’ll run out of jokes’, but I was lying.)

  Elizabeth, who had been Agatha Christie’s last editor, being a cat person, was particularly taken with the character of Springsteen, and I am convinced this is what sold her on the book. She was a superb editor; strict but fair and always realistic. At that first meeting, she told me not to even think about giving up the day job until ‘book number seven,’ by which time, as long as I hadn’t any children to support, I might consider it.

  I had to point out that I had just become a father and that we were thinking of the name Elizabeth (which was true). I think she was flattered, and she always took an interest in following years in the progress of Ripley children and Ripley cats.

  Just Another Angel would not actually be published, however, until August 1988, which, as Elizabeth said, gave me plenty of time to write a second.

  That ten month wait seemed to last forever, but I buckled down to being a father and tackling what the critics of the day called ‘the second novel hurdle,’ where so many aspiring writers fall. Flushed with enthusiasm, I began to read more crime fiction, finding myself drawn to the American school of writing and discovering with relish the works of Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and James Hall, though admiring the rest of the Collins Crime Club stable of writers, especially Reginald Hill and Robert Barnard. (I also discovered a fantastic crime writer called Jacqueline Wilson. I wonder whatever happened to her?)

  With a rush of blood to the head, I also applied to join the Crime Writers Association and received a very curt (some would say snotty) reply that I wasn’t eligible to attend a meeting until my book had been officially published, though I could, of course, pay my subscription dues immediately.

  There was some work still to be done on Just Another Angel though. Elizabeth Walter was not completely happy with the original plot-twist ending that Jo Scamp, the book’s femme fatale, had been trying to hide a lesbian love affair from her gangster husband. Having recently seen the film Mona Lisa, I wasn’t happy either (!) and so some re-working was necessary. There was some marvellous correspondence (which I failed to keep) between Elizabeth and me on the lines of, ‘I’ll trade you two lesbians for a more violent shoot-out scene,’ and so forth.

  With a more heterosexual ending, the book was put to bed around about February 1988, and it eventually appeared in August as one of the last of the old style ‘small’ hardbacks (13.5 cm x 20 cm) published by Collins or, I think, anyone else. Its cover price was £9.95.

  Fortuitously, as the book opens with a complaint about Britain’s antiquated licensing laws, the reform of pub hours, allowing them to open in the afternoon, came in at the end of August 1988, about a week after the book appeared.

  Being once again lucky rather than good, publication day coincided almost exactly with the opening of a new bookshop on Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley of old. This was a bookshop dedicated primarily to crime fiction, and was the brainchild of Maxim Jakubowski, a sci-fi buff, anthologist and later critic and crime novelist himself.

  As an author, I was invited to a preview the day before the shop opened to the public, and so I hurried down to Tottenham Court Road immediately after work to find Murder One absolutely heaving with writers and publishers, none of whom I knew and none of whom knew me.

  Through the scrum I met Maxim Jakubowski, with whom I was later to edit three Fresh Blood anthologies. He was full of apologies, but my new book had not yet arrived, and there to prove it was a gap in the alphabetical shelving in the R section.

  My despair lasted for about a minute, for by then I had located the free booze and, even better, spotted Elizabeth Walter getting out of a black London taxi with a box of books. So Just Another Angel did make it to the opening of Murder One – but only just.

  The book received generous reviews from Tim Binyon (Times Literary Supplement), Philip Oakes (Literary Review), John Coleman (Sunday Times) and F E ‘Bill’ Pardoe (Birmingham Post), all of whom I got to know and respect, though all of whom are sadly gone now.

  A paperback edition of the novel was published by Fontana in 1989 and quickly sold out. Copies seem to be rare, one changing hands in California in 2005 for $75. A second edition appeared in 1991, and it was translated into Spanish (Un Angel Mas), German (Heisse Scheine) and Japanese, in the latter of wh
ich it is still, amazingly, in print. In English, though, this is the first available edition since 1995.

  I think my first editor, those first reviewers and probably many of those very first customers at Murder One (which still thrives, in new premises round the corner on Charing Cross Road) would have been surprised, if not stunned, to think of the Angel saga continuing into the 21st Century and (this year) in his fourteenth novel.

  I know I am.

  Mike Ripley

  Colchester, July 2006

  Chapter One

  I was in the Gun having the first drink of the day, or the last drink of the night before, depending on how you looked at it, when she came through the door with a bunch of Hooray Henries six feet deep and twice as thick.

  The Gun, I’d better explain, is that rarity in England: a pub that opens when the punters want it to. Situated an apple-core throw away from Spitalfields fruit and veg market behind Liverpool Street station, the Gun has a special dispensation to open at six in the morning to serve all bona-fide market traders. Not that Trippy and Dod and I were bona-fide marketeers – most of the real ones have pretty dubious fides – but I’d done the landlord a favour or three in the past and was known there. Which is what it’s all about, really, isn’t it?

  The reason we were there at 6.30 am was the gig in Brighton the night before. The venue had turned out to be a private club and a gay bar to boot. We had innocently thought that the Queen’s Head would be a pub. Not that that was the problem. We had arrived late to find two other members of the band had turned up and gone again when they saw the clientele, and two had simply not turned up at all. Add to that a failed amplifier, which meant the club’s disco was out of action, and the club owner was about to have his hair lifted by its henna-ed roots. He at least was happy to see us, and offered to increase our wages to £50 apiece if we started immediately. I managed to get only a couple of pints inside me in the time it took Dod to fix up his drum kit, and Trippy didn’t get a chance to drop anything heavy (he’s not called Trippy because he falls over his bootlaces) before he was sat in front of a rickety upright piano and swung into ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. I let him have three choruses before I got the mouthpiece into my trumpet and took the lead, fluffing the first two bars badly, though nobody seemed to notice.