Soho Crime Tales, Sordid to the End

There are no good guys in Jake Arnott’s crime novels and not too much of the good life either. Although set in the swinging ‘60s, an electrifying time of pop music, mod fashion and British soccer prowess, Arnott focuses on London’s dark underbelly.

In “The Long Firm” and his more recent “He Kills Coppers,” the British author creates a world of Soho gangsters and whores, of killers, corrupt police and sleazy journalists bound together by sin.

“Well, I do tend to think virtue is dependent on circumstances,” Arnott said breezily. “Villains are a much easier way of looking at humanity. Shakespeare constantly wrote about villains....The kind of Catholic thing I grew up with, you know, man being in a fallen state, makes sense to me. I think there are possibilities for redemption. I don’t necessarily include them in my books.”

Arnott laughs when he says this last bit, and it quickly becomes apparent that he laughs easily. Perhaps this is to be expected after the critical and financial success he has had with his two books in Britain and the United States. London’s Evening Standard called “The Long Firm” “an immaculate debut”; the Sunday Times said Arnott has a “gift for period detail and atmosphere”; and People magazine weighed in, calling “Coppers” a “wicked delight.”

Still, Arnott’s breezy manner is far more surprising than if he had arrived at the Patisserie Valerie with a snub-nose revolver tucked into his waistband. Instead, the 40-year-old Arnott showed up with an undershirt peeking boyishly out of the collar of his navy-blue shirt. His wide eyes, open face and spiky hair made him look slightly startled, but hardly threatening.

He is friendly and self-deprecating, even though he is something of a grenade tosser, a myth breaker. Arnott, the kid who left school at 16, quotes German author Bertolt Brecht, Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci and Alfred Hitchcock. He is a gay writer whose homosexual characters may loathe being gay. His ‘60s mark the end of the British Empire, not the beginning of pop culture. And his crime novels do not have crimes to solve or tidy endings typical of the genre.

“I’m not really a genre writer. There is a kind of neatness and mathematics to crime fiction, and I don’t have the precision for the way you get a sort of resolution, even though in most crime books there is quite a bit of ambivalence in the central character. Certainly with Dashiell Hammett, who is a big influence on me, his hero is always incredibly subverted by all sorts of things,” Arnott said.

In his own books, Arnott said, “There’s nothing to be solved in terms of individual guilt. It’s much more the social aspects that I’m interested in. It’s not so much a whodunit as a wedunit.”

“He Kills Coppers” is a fictionalized account of the killing of three London police officers in 1966, during the summer of England’s World Cup victory. The gunman, Harry Roberts, became a folk hero to anarchists and working-class mobs who turned his name into an antipolice chant with the refrain “He kills coppers,” from which the book title is taken.

Arnott writes in sawed-off English, in clipped sentences fired like bullets at the readers’ imagination. His shooter is Billy Porter, a former soldier who learned jungle warfare during the 1950s in Malaya, now known as Malaysia. Back in civilian life, Porter is a small-time crook out to commit a crime with two hapless cohorts when the police stop their van. Rather than be caught with an illegal weapon, Porter does the only thing it seems he has ever done well: He shoots. Three policemen die and Porter goes on the run for 20 years.

His story is entwined with two others: that of Det. Sgt. Frank Taylor, a friend of one of the dead officers, who is reluctantly drawn into a world of graft while pursuing the killer; and journalist Tony Meehan, a self-hating gay who covers the shooting for the Sunday Illustrated tabloid and eventually commits murder himself.

Obsessed with Porter’s crime and escape from justice, Meehan says, “He was out there somewhere, at large, a killer on the run. My killer was still trapped inside of me.”

That is about as close as an Arnott character gets to self-reflection. They are busy doing, not thinking. Busy getting away with murder.

“It’s how I see the world. I am getting my characters to do a lot. They don’t have much time to sit and think about things. They don’t try to analyze,” Arnott said.

“It’s like [American writer] William Burroughs once said to [the poet] Allen Ginsberg, ‘Remember, Allen, human is an adjective, not a noun.’”

Conversation with Arnott produces a stream of ideas on British society, writing and, inevitably, gays. The central character in his first book, “The Long Firm,” is Harry Starks, a homosexual gangster in the mold of one of Britain’s renowned gangland twins, Ronnie Kray.

“When I was growing up, the fact that Ronnie Kray was homosexual was very important to me,” Arnott said. He was not exactly a role model, but an example of a confident homosexual. And, unlike the journalist Meehan, the tough guy Starks is comfortable with his homosexuality. He’s a racketeer and a victimizer, but certainly not a victim.

“That is something I was determined to do in the first book. He’s not a martyr. So many gay literary figures are martyrs, good people and something awful has happened to them, or they’re dying of a dreadful disease, they’re sad, dramatic lonely queens or whatever. I was determined that I wanted to write a gay character who wasn’t a victim, wasn’t even gay necessarily, who had no interest in having to justify himself in any way other than the fact that he liked boys,” Arnott said.

Arnott grew up in a middle-class family in Buckinghamshire with a house full of novels that his father read on the train to and from London each day. Arnott consumed them with pleasure.

He left home for a series of seedy London flats where he brushed up against the kind of anarchists he impales in “He Kills Coppers.” He undertook odd jobs after leaving school, including stints as a mortuary technician and an artist’s life model, eventually turning to writing.

Arnott wrote for years before settling on the idea of a gangster book after Ronnie Kray died in 1995. He sent off the manuscript of “The Long Firm,” landed a six-figure contract and became an overnight literary success in Britain after the book’s release in 1999. As a result, aspiring writers constantly probe him for his secrets.

“People will ask about one’s writing regime. All of that is irrelevant. You don’t have some sort of formula. I think writers often lie about that, anyway. Graham Greene always used to say that he wrote 300 words a day and would stop mid-sentence when he got there. And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s a great line and everyone remembers it and some people believed it.’ But it meant nobody had to ask him that question again,” Arnott said.

He insists he does love writing, although sometimes that is the last and most difficult step in the making of a book.

“Hitchcock said the most boring part of the filming process was when he actually filmed, because he’d imagined it all. Every single shot, he knew what he was going to do. That’s how I felt sometimes. You get these incredible bursts of a great idea, often when you’re walking down the street or something, and you write it. And when you finally finesse it, you’re already tired with this idea.”

Fortunately, Arnott has new ideas. He’s working on a third crime novel in what has inadvertently become a trilogy.