Duffy

Dan Kavanagh

Years ago I picked up a book, called, I think, “Duffy”. A crime novel, Duffy himself was a bisexual detective. He played in goal for his local Sunday pub football team. I don't remember much else, other than liking the book enough to pick up the follow ups, Fiddle City, Putting the Boot In and Going to the Dogs.

Here's the Dan Kavanagh bio:

Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at seventeen and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship at Montevideo, he roamed across the Americas taking a variety of jobs: he was a steer-wrestler, a waiter-on-roller-skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify, and lives in North Islington.

Now it turns out that Dan Kavanagh was the pen name used by Julian Barnes. Winner of the Booker Prize with A Sense of an Ending, frequent Booker short- and long-lister, and generally top top writer. That explains a lot.

Anyway, the books are being re-issued, they're sort of crime fiction for anyone who normally avoids crime fiction, and they're available for a massive 60p through the library service. That's the under-attack library service that actually provides a service, as opposed to the ever-more-expensive house of commons and civil service departments, that are not under attack, but that represent no value and provide no service whatsoever.

A Death in the Family

I've almost finished A Death In The Family, the brutally frank first instalment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six volume sequence of biographical novels. It's from childhood to early twenties, I suppose, and chronicles the death of his father in the last section.

The books have gone down a storm in Norway, and, apparently, part two, A Man In Love, is better still.

Spiral, series three

The BBC have broadcast this, albeit on one of their non-flagship, soon to be shut-down channels.

But it's made in France.

A simple idea, follow the paths of a few, select central characters, in a gritty, realistic, no-pulled-punches police procedural, and use the city locations as a co-star. I'm on episode four (of eight) and the investigating police team and judge are hunting a serial killer, the street girls are rebelling against their eastern european uber-pimps, the judge has just lost his mother, his rag in front of an interviewer with a hidden camera, and the plot. He's gunning for a corrupt local politician with friends in (very) high places. The prosecuting deputy judge has abandoned that career to take the bar oath and start earning fortunes defending those he was recently prosecuting.

There's some dodgy dealing, some cops with their lives falling apart (see The Wire), and a will to deal with some difficult subject matter without getting mawkish or calling in the house censor. There's a will, in short, to be something other than safe, bland and feeble.