King of the Streets by John Baker (1998)

At first glance she was a nice old lady, but when you got to give her another look you saw right away that she was weird. Something about her walk, perhaps? The way she nodded her head from side to side or kept glancing back at the passing cars? There was nothing immediately wrong about the way she was dressed. Cal could see colours on these new closed circuit screens, still hadn't got used to it; rust colour to her print skirt, maroon cardigan hanging from her shoulders, draped. Looking closer he could make out strong leather shoes, hair permed and reminiscent of the forties, stiff with setting lotion, tight little kiss curls framing the upper part of her face. No, he was remembering his grandmother. The screens did that to you sometimes, gave a fairly good outline and somehow forced your imagination to fill in the details.

Death Minus Zero by John Baker (Gollancz 1996)

He led them over to a Scorpio Auto on the other side of the car park. Blue job with black leather inside. Norman checked through the window to make sure there was some sound equipment inside. Using his bent coat hanger he had the thing open in about ninety seconds.

"How do you do that?" the youngest wigger asked.

 Norman locked the car again and fitted his wire hook down inside the window frame. He fiddled for a moment, said, "Now you try."

The youngest wigger took hold of the coat hanger and jiggled it about.

"Just about there," Norman said. "You feel the little lever inside? Don't pull so hard. That's right, you can feel it moving."

 "Yeah. I got it," the kid said.

 "OK," Norman told him. "Push the handle in and pull it up slowly."

The door of the Scorpio opened. "Easier than a can of sardines," Norman said. He told the eldest kid to get his bag from the BMW. When he brought it Norman shoved it in the back of the Scorpio. "And the Tina Turner tape," he said.

"I've got something else to teach you," he said to the youngest wigger.

"What's that?" The kid was eager to learn everything this character could show him.

"Put your back here," Norman said, pointing to the door of a VW Camper. "And hold the door handle with both hands."

The kid did as he was told.

Norman came over and stood in front of him. "You got hold of it with both hands?" Norman asked.

The kid nodded and Norman butted him hard in the face. The little wigger dropped like a stone. His friend ran off down the car park, putting about seventy yards between himself and Norman. "You're a fast learner," Norman told him. The little wigger was sitting on the concrete shaking his head from side to side.

 "That's the best lesson you've had today," Norman told him, retrieving his hundred and twenty pounds from the kid's pocket. "Don't forget it."

Norman left him there, got behind the wheel of the Scorpio and wired it to go. He waved to the elder wigger as he drove on past, slammed Tina into the tape deck, and stuck a chicken sandwich into his mouth.

Believe in the Sign by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2007)

Back then mums and dads didn't go in for quality time or anything so fey with their kids. They lived their lives (whatever that involved) and you were left to yours. You could play football in the street. Or lie flat on a railway sleeper floating through a culvert on the canal. Or you could follow the motorway for miles on the other side of the fence, passing through factory units and farm yards. Or you could see who could jump furthest down concrete steps on the stairwells at Ashfield Valley flats, carrying the whimpering victor home later. Or you could get out your bike and ride to Hollingworth Lake where the tougher kids, knees knocking, chins trembling, waded out into the icy blue, fearful of gigantic child-eating pikes.

Stone Cold Red Hot by Cath Staincliffe (Allison and Busby 2001)

My first impression of Roger Pickering was of nervous tension. He stood on the doorstep, hiding behind his fringe of light brown hair, eyes cast anywhere but at me.

"Sal Kilkenny?" He managed to get my name out.

"Yes, MrPickering. Please come in."

I led him along the hall and downstairs to my office in the cellar. With the self-absorption of the painfully shy, he made no small talk, no comment on our location, and politely refused coffee.

Red Hill: A Mining Community by Tony Parker (Coronet Books 1986)

- He says it'll burn me up in flames one day, my husband does, me and my blazing hate. He says it can't be kept up for ever, you've got to forgive and forget. I'll never forget, that's one thing that's sure: and I'll never forgive neither, at least I can't see myself doing. The Coal Board's turned my husband, who all his life's been an honest upright working man, into a criminal. They've made him someone with a conviction, and a criminal record for it. And as well as that they've made him into someone who because of it'll never again in his whole life get a decent job. He did nothing wrong in the first place: but they won't relent and give him his job back. So neither will I relent either. Those people, the Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, Maggie Thatcher, the Tories - I hate every one of them and I'll hate them till my dying day for what they've done to my husband. He can forgive them if he likes, and if he does he's a better person and a better Christian than I am. To me they're the biggest bastards who ever walked the face of the earth, and every morning when I get up I curse them and I curse them every night when I go to bed.

(from 'Me and my blazing hate')

The Modfather: My Life With Paul Weller by David Lines (William Heinemann 2006)

Getting inside the Pavilion was like stepping into a furnace. The floor swam in warm beer and the air was thick with smoke. The noise from the chanting, baying crowd drowned out the support act - a skinhead poet who went by the name of Seething Wells. I could hardly believe it, I mean, putting on a poet to entertain The Jam Army? Then I got it. I got it right there and then what Paul was trying to do. He could have stuck anyone on as support and they wouldn't have survived the audience who were so desperate to see The Jam they would have even booed The Beatles off stage. Paul was also trying to make his audience see that by having someone as support come on and recite poetry, he was distancing himself from the 'Jam Army'. Seething Wells, however, was on fire. I don't mean he was on top form, I mean the man had been set alight. The record company were handing out album sleeves on the way in, and someone had set fire to one and sent it, flaming, spinning through the air, skimming the heads of the crowd like a fiery frisbee onto the stage where it caught the sleeve of his green bomber jacket and in precisely three seconds flat the thing went up like a bonfire. Seething was seriously seething and frantically tried to get his jacket off but it had started melting into him, a roadie ran on with a bucket of water and chucked it all over the poor fat poet and then Seething ran off - it was like a trip to the fucking circus - and then, from nowhere, John, Paul's dad, was on stage and a mighty, mighty cheer went up . . . 'For those of you sitting down at the back, please be upstanding for . . . The Jam! The place exploded.

Bad Haircut - Stories of the Seventies by Tom Perrotta (Berkley Books 1994)

It was just my luck to get Coach Bielski for driver's ed. Even when I played football, he hadn't been that crazy about me. He didn't like my attitude, the way I'd shrug when he asked me why I'd thrown a bad pass or missed a tackle. And he didn't like the way my hair stuck out from the back of my helmet or sometimes curled out the earholes. He'd tug on it at practice and say, "Cut that fucking hair, Garfunkel, or I'll cut it for you. I just got a chainsaw for my birthday." (He always called me Garfunkel, because of my hair and because he'd once seen me in the hallway, strumming someone's guitar. To Bielski, Simon and Garfunkel represented the outer limits of hippiedom.)

(From the short story, 'You Start to Live')

Misterioso by Alan Plater (Methuen Paperback 1987)

Fantasy had always come easily to Rachel.

As a very little girl, she had wanted to be Her Majesty The Queen when she grew up. When she discovered the title was not vacant, other possibilities began to haunt her imagination: Judy Garland, Bambi, any one of The Beatles' girlfriends, Ann Jones, Miss Piggy, Lucinda Prior-Palmer and Mrs Hodges, the PE teacher. In her late teens, the onset of political fervour and a semblance of maturity produced a new set of role models: Sylvia Pankhurst, Emma Goldman, Pat Arrowsmith and Nina Simone.

Once upon a happy time in bed, Will had summarized her fantasy life with his customary gentle astringency: 'You really want to be a Greenham woman with an electric blanket and a voice like Ella Fitzgerald's'

Steak . . . Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody (The Parrs Wood Press 2003)

Sunday, 3rd March, 1974

The game, though, falls into the Twilight Zone. Eric Probert, Arthur Mann shut down the supply route to the front men. John Robertson and Ian Bowyer aren't getting time to exert their considerable talents on the game. For a quarter of an hour, nothing happens, literally. The crowd is silent, not baying or taunting, more dozing off after a good Sunday lunch.

"For Christ's sake David, get a fucking tackle in on him." It is Don Masson; Masson the Miserable, Masson the Merciless, our leader. He's right, of course. Despite being a most obnoxious piece of work and about as popular as a turd arising in the communal bath, he's absolutely effing right.

Must clobber the flash bastard. Supposed to man-to-man mark him and haven't even seen his backside yet. The game's just passing me by. Come on, get a grip. Here's the ball, there's McKenzie - whack. That was easy.

"Well done Davie. Well fucking done son. That's fucking better, eh." Masson the Merciless has passed judgement. I have pleased our leader. I feel 10ft tall. McKenzie looks hurt as if to say: "Who the hell are you to kick me you fat bastard?"

I don't care. Today, the Notts County shirt seems a liitle loose and baggy.

This Little Ziggy by Martin Newell (House of Stratus 2001)

We have no extradition treaties with the past. That is, we can't bring our younger selves back into the present to account for our doings there. At best, all we may have are a few scribbled notes on faded paper and perhaps a handful of faded Polaroids to tell us that events ever really happened at all. These recollections begin in the late summer of 1964 and end in the early spring of 1975. They are not, therefore, an autobiography as such.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (Anchor Canada 2006)

He was lost. He wasn't used to being lost. He was the kind of man who drew up plans and then executed them efficiently, but now everything was conspiring against him in ways he decided he couldn't have foreseen. He had been stuck in a jam on the A1 for two mind-numbing hours so that it was already past the middle of the morning when he arrived in Edinburgh. Then he'd gone adrift on a one-way system and been thwarted by a road closed because of a burst water main. It had been raining, steadily and unforgivingly, on the drive north and had only begun to ease off as he hit the outskirts of town. The rain had in no way deterred the crowds - it had never occurred to him that Edinburgh was in the middle of 'the Festival' and that there would be carnival hordes of people milling around as the end of war had just been declared. The closest he had previously got to the Edinburgh Festival was accidentally turning on Late Night Review and seeing a bunch of middle-class wankers discussing some pretentious piece of fringe theatre.

A Man Called Jones by Julian Symons (Pan Books 1947)

The tone was masterful, and one would hardly dare to say, Bland reflected, that it didn't suit. Was this perhaps still the captain of the cricket team regarding Bland as a boy trying, not very successfully, to bowl leg-breaks? Or was this the real and characteristic Sinclair? As these questions passed through Bland’s mind Sinclair smiled again, and said, ‘Think I've changed? Without waiting for a reply he went on, ‘I have, you know. In one way at least. I aspire to be an author. Detective stories. Tell me honestly, now, what do you think of them?'

Bland picked tentatively at half a lobster in its shell, and put a piece of firm white flesh into his mouth. ‘Delicious,’ he said, and then, ‘Not very much like life.’

Sinclair pointed with a fork. His face was bright and enthusiastic. ‘Exactly. The essential thing about the detective story is that it’s not very much like life. It doesn’t set out to be like life - that isn’t its function. The detective story is decidedly a romantic affair - something that brings a world they don‘t know, a world of romantic violence quite alien to their own lives to the sickly young men who spend their days in front of a ledger, the overworked and underpaid shop girls, the colonels in the clubs and the dowagers in their boudoirs. It isn’t reality that these people want from detective stories - it’s fantasy. The future of the detective story is in the field of fantasy!

'77 Sulphate Strip by Barry Cain (Ovolo Books 2007)

The Jam

Royal College of Art, London

It's a godawful small affair . . .

Stage as long as Platform six at Victoria station. Baggageless porters The Jam 40 feet apart and monitorless. Full house. Lights! The Tyla Gang before and the Cimarrons after.

An artless audience at the Royal College of Art show their appreciation of the white-soul boys up there on the stage with the huge Union Jack backdrop depicting the three moods The Jam take you through at a gig - red hot expanding into white heat, contracting into teenage blue.

In case you’ve forgotten, guitarist Paul Weller, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler are The Jam. They are not, I repeat not a recycled Who. They write concise, contemporary songs like ‘ln The City’, ‘Bricks & Mortar' and 'I’ve Changed My Address’ enhancing the overall effect with a shrewd selection of old material 'Batman’, ‘So Sad About Us’ and ‘Midnight Hour'. The result? A well-equipped show; incisive, dynamic, piebald. Black suits, white lights, black ties, white shirts, black thoughts, white rock. They won't blow it now.

The Jam always come across as much younger than other bands, like Brian Kidd in a team of Bobby Charltons. They have the pace and the sneer - Paul Weller could hardly be described as ‘this smiling man’. He drinks but refuses to take drugs on the grounds that they are immoral, debilitating and, well, uncool. Drug-induced confidence is unnecessary for the cool dude that's Paul Weller. But he gets more hangovers that way.

Paul is cool because he's a man with a genuine talent who hasn't quite realised it yet. And that's when the good stuff comes.

A Three-Pipe Problem by Julian Symons (Penguin Crime 1975)

‘But how did you discover it? I mean, the docks?’

‘I read this Observer colour supp. piece, you see, and it said all the obvious piaces are finished, a house in Battersea even costs a fortune, but around the East India Dock area there were still some of these perfect little squares -’

‘Lived in by the peasants, no doubt, with a loo out at the back -’

‘Exactly, and there was this perfectly dreamy little house, just a cottage, and Fabrina said it’d got terrific possibilities -’

‘Possibilities, I should think so.”

He listened gloomily to the exchange taking place between a couple with long flowing hair, both wearing bell bottoms and bright pullovers. Did the absence of make-up indicate their masculinity or the opposite, were their voices male or female? He found it impossible to say. The pub depressed him. It had been done up by the brewers, and in honour of its name they had turned it into a kind of military encampment. Reproductions of battle scenes were around the walls, regimental flags and scrolls took up other bits of vacant space, what had once been public and private bars were now called Sergeants’ Mess and Officers’ Mess. It was certainly not what it had been in Holmes's time, and he would infinitely have preferred a few villainous Lascars to the trendy young creatures who mixed with the tough-looking dockers. Not that the dockers seemed to mind either the desecration of their pub, or its part-occupation by these aliens. From the large central bar which was actually called the Parade Ground, Sher pondered on the superiority of past to present. He was jerked out of this reverie by the words: ‘That’s Joey, just come in.’

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime 1965)

They were finished a half hour later. Kollberg drove quickly and carelessly through the rain but Martin Beck didn't seem nervous, in spite of the fact that driving usually put him in a bad mood. They didn't speak at all during the trip. When they pulled up in front of the house where Martin Beck lived, Kollberg finally said: "Now you can go to bed and think about all this. So long."

Starter For Ten By David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton 2003)

Walking back along the High Street after the tutorial, I see Rebecca whats-her-name and a couple of the fuckingangryactuallys that she's always hanging around with. They're thrusting leaflets into the hands of indifferent shoppers and for a moment I contemplate crossing the road. I'm a bit wary of her to be honest, especially after our last conversatron, but I've made a promise to myself to make as many new friends as possible at university, even if they glve every indication of not actually liking me very much.

'Hiya,' I say

'It's the Dancing Queen! How you doing?' she says, and hands me a leaflet, urging me to boycott Barclays.

Actually my grant money's with one of the other caring humanitarian multinational banking organisations!' I say, with an incisive wry, satirical glint in my eye, but she's not really looking and has gone back to handing out leaflets and shouting 'Fight apartheid! Support the boycott. Don't buy South African goods! Say no to apartheid! . . .' I start to feel a bit boycotted too, so start to walk away when she says, in a marginally softer voice, 'So, how ya' settling in, then?'

'Oh, alright. I'm sharing my house with a rlght pair of bloody Ruperts. But apart from that it's not too bad . . . ' I had thrown in the hint of class war for her benefit really but I don't think she gets lt, because she looks at me confused.

'They're both called Rupert?'

'No, they're called Marcus and Josh.'

'So who are the Ruperts?'

'They are, they're, you know - Ruperts', but the remark is starting to lose some of its cutting edge and I wonder if I should offer to hand out leaflets instead. After all, it is a cause I'm passionate about, and I have a strict policy of not eating South Afrrcan fruit that's almost as strict as my policy of not eating fruit. But now Rebecca's folding up the remaining leaflets and handing them to her colleagues.

'Right, that's me done for today. See you later, Toby, see you Rupert . . . ' and suddenly I find myself walking down the street side by side with her, without quite knowing whose idea it was. 'So, where're we off to now, then?' she asks, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her black vinyl coat.

Malvinas Requiem by Rodolfo Fogwill (Serpent's Tail 1983)

Garcia had brought the newspaper photos showing the two sets of officers having tea together. The Brits had given him a bundle of photos of Argie officers who had surrendered taking tea with the naval captains from the British fleet. On the reverse were written the names of the Argentine officers, and of the place where each had surrendered.

'Chuck the lot of them!' said Viterbo. He was insistent. The Brits had asked the dillos to hand them out in the Quartermaster's, to hasten the surrender.

'Let's throw them away! No surrender! Let them kill each other, so they all fuck off and leave us in peace. We'll chuck the photos away and tell them they were distributed.'

So the dillos burnt them in the stove. There were lots of photos, the bundle was as big as a large ammunition box. It burnt slowly, giving off an acrid smoke, which made their eyes smart and their throats sore.

Heartland by Anthony Cartwright (Tindal Street Press 2009)

Rob imagined that somewhere, in some run-down football club next to a rusting corned-beef factory in the back end of Argentina, there was a minor local politician proclaiming loudly the inevitability of an Argentinian goal. Sitting next to him, there'd be his nephew, a failed footballer, fidgeting in his seat, barely able to watch, sitting with his old man on the other side, a disabled Malvinas veteran or prisoner of the generals or an old team-mate of Maradona's or something, biting his nails, wondering just quite why and how some men that you didn't even know running around on a field on a different continent, some foot or hand of God, might somehow re-order the world, or at least re-order the world in you.

Dyer want the rest o that, Rob? Jim motioned at the half-eaten burger and reached for it as Rob shook his head.

Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (Corgi Books 1984)

'A little blasphemy won't send you packin' t'Hell, Mrs Scully.'

"If it does, there's a lot of people who've done us down I'd like t'meet there. We were brought up in the Depression, me an' his dad, an' then through the blitz an' bloody ration books, an' that joker with his 'y've never had it so good'; aye f'them what's always had it. An' then a few good years just t'trick yer into thinkin' things're goin' t'work out alright, before the world turns around an' hits y'kids in the face. It's never them at the top what suffer though, it's us down here what have t'go through it, as far as I can see. An' whatever the politicians say, it's always goin' t'be the same. It all comes back t'those that can least afford it.'