Stark House Press does not just delve back to the glory days of paperback originals. With UNDERGROUND AND COLLECTED STORIES from Russell James, we have a current writer whose novels are barely 20 years old, and someone who sadly is not as well known as some other current British authors on these shores.

But hopefully, with this collection and the reprint of PAYBACK, things will change. James is what he and his friends have deemed as “the new blood” of British crime writers. It’s just a shame that it taken this long for me to read him. James himself provides the introduction to this collection, pointing out the type of stories he likes to tell: ones where the police – if they even appear – make cameos at best.

From 1989, UNDERGROUND was James’ debut novel, and there was some considerable hype about his writing style, with one publication quoted on the back cover making a comparison between Len Deighton and David Goodis. It’s totally warranted.

UNDERGROUND is aptly titled, since it has two meanings for the storyline: Our nameless narrator is in the London Underground, while he is also trying to live his life underground, in that he works for a group of men who don’t like any attention drawn to them.

We are only told what the narrator wants to tell us, which isn’t much, leaving the reader totally in the dark. James, in his first try, paints a bleak noir-ish world where you’ll be grabbing onto any little clue that gives a hint of what is to come.

Our narrator first details that he believes he is being tailed and goes into great description of how to lose a tail, and this all has to be done before he meets his contact Victor, who also seems to have gained a tail. It gets to the point where our narrator takes the train to an unscheduled trip just to hide out from whomever is looking for him. He assumes it’s another mob, and gets taken in by a girl he meets on the train.

But once he arrives back home, he finds that there are some uninvited guests waiting for him inside. He’s tipped off by a neighbor who explains it’s best to find another place to stay for a while. All through this, the reader has no idea of the real plan. We find out one of his partners, Timmy, has been taken. But by whom is still a question, yet retaliation will be the answer.

Small clues are dropped here with key phrases, but our narrator is still playing it very close to the vest, even when he gets help from a group of Rastas that he knows. He keeps them in the dark once they capture someone who broke into the apartment again. This leads to a riot in the area with all the press pointing fingers at our narrator, who was long gone before the shooting started. When it’s finally revealed what the job our narrator has been waiting to pull, it becomes obvious who he works for and who he really is.

But again, James does not come right out and say it. He leaves readers to put this puzzle together themselves – something other authors could learn to do. “Don’t dumb it down” is what I’m guessing is James’ motto, since he weaves the story so well that even though you feel slighted since it ends with unanswered questions, you feel as if you understand what will happen to all those involved.

Switching gears in a big way compared to other Stark House books, this collection contains not another full-length novel, but an assortment of short stories picked by the author himself. Along with each story is an introductory piece written by James, showing off his very humorous side; his take on British police detectives in novels is just priceless.

We are given five stories, with only two of them featuring a carry-over character. First is “Brace Yourself,” which tells of a shooting party out on the countryside. This was the only story that a good amount of the readers will figure out long before the climax. Still, it’s a very amusing tale, but the idea has been done before.

The next two stories both feature a character by the name of Terri. In the first, “A Piece of Cake,” she plays the central character of a woman who knows exactly what she wants and has it all figured out. Then, in “No Debts Unpaid,” she is more of a secondary character who strikes up with an ex-con who might have ratted out some folks to get a shorter sentence.

Following this is the only detective story James has written, but his version of a detective is not the norm. In the intro, he makes it clear that he is not a fan of using detectives, so he made his so different. “Lost” is a basic story of a woman who wants her pregnant daughter found. When the detective has no luck, the woman goes on the search herself. This story is the best of the five, since the sucker punch James serves is so unexpected.

To close out the collection, James states that he wants to leave the reader with a nice aftertaste. That final story is not some dour look in the British underworld, but more of a love story called “How Could It Last?,” in which a man marries a former stripper 20 years his junior and gets saddled with her ex-con mother. It’s more then a little bittersweet when it all ends.

I hope that Stark House will continue with this kind of release, since there are plenty of other crime writers who have a plethora of short stories that could easily be matched with one of their novels. But if that’s not possible, how about more reissues of James’ output, since it’s not as widely available over here? –Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• PAYBACK by Russell James