Shit from Shinola. You have to hand it to the goddamn Yanks, they have great verbals, man. I love the way they cuss.

I killed my first last Tuesday, I can’t believe it was so easy. Remorse? Not a fuckin’ trace. Only sorry I didn’t do it sooner.

I’m forty-four years old, and I guess I’m what you’d call a late starter. Or as them Yanks have it, a late bloomer. Thirty years I could have been mowing down the fucks and what was I doing?

Working.

A working stiff.

I think it was Bob Geldof who said work was the biggest con of all. I listen to The Rats with ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ and I’ve got my soundtrack down. They nailed it. The silicon chip inside my head just switched to overload.

Been a long time coming.

My old man, Anthony Crew, worked in an asbestos factory all his life. The last ten years he spent coughing up blood and gook till his eyes bulged. His employers, did they cover the hospital bills? They did fuck-all.

The National Health Service did the best they could but he was fucked and gone; he was dead and didn’t know it, wouldn’t lie down. The Mick in him, those Paddies, tough sons of bitches. Every Sunday I went round his gaff, a council flat on Railton Road, and listened to him cough. James Joyce is buried in Switzerland near a zoo, and his wife, Nora Barnacle, said:

‘He liked to listen to the lions roar.’ Brixton is as close to a zoo as it gets. My dad, his face contorted to grotesque degrees of agony, and I wanted to kill some fucker.

Now I have:

Willeford

Woolich

Thompson.

My heroes. I’ve read crime fiction for over twenty years, can’t get enough, black as it’s painted. The classic hard-boiled, though, these guys are the biz.

Noir and out.

Shit-kickers par excellence. My bookcase is an homage to pulp: