Redneck Press: Home of TOUGH

That was the history of Marseilles, and always had been. A utopia. The only utopia in the world. A place where anyone, of any color, could get off a boat or a train with his suitcase in his hand and not a cent in his pocket, and melt into the crowd. A city where, as soon as he’d set foot on its soil, this man could say, “This is it. I’m home.” -Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos Crime fiction does setting uniquely well. From Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles to Robert B. Parker’s Boston to Charles Willeford’s Miami, crime novels map out the cities we live in and give us the cities we imagine. How much, for instance, does the popular perception of Los Angeles owe to Chandler’s novels and their numerous adaptions? When I was lucky enough to go to Marseilles a couple years ago, I used Jean-Claude Izzo’s magnificent trilogy of novels set there as a guide. We stayed in Les Goudes, the fishing village at the edge of the city where Izzo’s detective, Fabio Montale, lives. Nestled between the metropo...

C ertain people, Healy knew, had no sense of irony. They couldn’t see themselves in the lyrics of a song, not even when the song was about blokes like them, not even when they were being made fun of, and that was Stanhope all over, bobbing his head, singing off-key at the top of his lungs to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” where they sat at a beer-sticky table in the back of their local, the Spotted Cow in Littlehampton. “He drinks a lager drink,” Stanhope sang, “he drinks a cider drink,” and he grinned, showing the gap between his front teeth, the guy two-fisting a pint of Stella Artois and one of Strongbow. Why couldn’t he see that he was being made fun of, the song about regular lads like Stanhope, lager louts in their football jerseys and trainers out on the piss on a Saturday night? He was also Healy’s best friend, his pill and hash connection, and just at the moment, they were waiting for Stanhope’s supplier, a white South African named Colin who lived on a council estate in East Lon...