Neon Madman

By John Harvey

The final entry in the groundbreaking series of hardboiled British mysteries starring Scott Mitchell, the toughest detective to ever call London home.

The ledge isn’t quite wide enough for Scott Mitchell to stand, but he’ll have to make it work. He keeps his balance just long enough to get a few quick snaps of the motel room opposite, where a client’s wife is enjoying a spirited act of adultery and has no idea that she’s been caught on film. It’s sleazy work, but anything that keeps Mitchell’s wallet fat and his hide safe is fine by him. But he took this case because it carried not a hint of danger—so why is somebody trying to kill him?

The West Indian man bursts into Mitchell’s office threatening to tear him apart. Mitchell talks him down before the man is able to break any limbs—or, God forbid, his camera—but he still hasn’t got a clue who the intruder is, or how he’s tied up in the adultery case. And when this simple bit of divorce work goes from quick and easy to slow and deadly, Mitchell will have to move fast if he wants to stay alive.

The final novel in the series that brought the American hardboiled style to Britain, Neon Madman is perfect for fans of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald. Scott Mitchell was one of the first hardboiled British private investigators, and he remains the best.

Neon Madman is the 4th book in the Scott Mitchell Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504038867

John Harvey

John Harvey has been writing crime fiction for more than forty years. His first novel, Lonely Hearts, was selected by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century' and he has been the recipient of both the silver and diamond dagger awards.

Book preview

This is for Libby Houston: poet.

The Scott Mitchell Mysteries

An Introduction

Growing up in England in the immediate postwar years and into the 1950s was, in some respects, a drab experience. Conformity ruled. It was an atmosphere of be polite and know your place. To a restless teenager, anything American seemed automatically exciting. Movies, music—everything. We didn’t even know enough to tell the real thing from the fake.

The first hard-boiled crime novels I read were written by an Englishman pretending to be American: Stephen Daniel Frances, using the pseudonym Hank Janson, which was also the name of his hero. With titles like Smart Girls Don’t Talk and Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, the Janson books, dolled up in suitably tantalizing covers, made their way, hand to hand, around the school playground, falling open at any passage that, to our young minds, seemed sexy and daring. This was a Catholic boys’ grammar school, after all, and any reference to parts of the body below the waist, other than foot or knee, was thought to merit, if not excommunication, at least three Our Fathers and a dozen Hail Marys.

From those heady beginnings, I moved on, via the public library, to another English writer, Peter Cheyney, and books like Dames Don’t Care and Dangerous Curves—which, whether featuring FBI agent Lemmy Caution or British private eye Slim Callaghan, were written in the same borrowed faux American pulp style. But it was Cheyney who prepared me for the real deal.

I can’t remember exactly when I read my first Raymond Chandler, but it would have been in my late teens, still at the same school. Immediately, almost instinctively, I knew it was something special. Starting with The Big Sleep—we’d seen the movie with Bogart and Bacall—I read them all, found time to regret the fact there were no more, then started again. My friends did the same. When we weren’t kicking a ball around, listening to jazz, or hopelessly chasing girls, we’d do our best to come up with first lines for the Philip Marlowe sequel we would someday write. The only one I can remember now is ‘He was thirty-five and needed a shave.’

I would have to do better. The Scott Mitchell series was my attempt to do exactly that.

I’d been a full-time writer for all of eighteen months. Spurred on, to some extent, by tales of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett—another formative influence—and others, writing for the pulps at the rate of so many cents a word, I had given up my day job as an English and drama teacher to try my hand as a hack for hire. Biker books, war books, westerns: 128-page paperbacks at the rate of roughly one a month. One of the editors I got to know was Angus Wells, with whom I would later write several series of westerns, and it was he who gave my proposal for a new crime series the green light.

Scott Mitchell: the toughest private eye—and the best.

American pulp in a clearly English setting—that was the premise. A hero who was a more down-at-the-heels version of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. A style that owed a great deal to Chandler and a little, in places, to Mickey Spillane. Forty years earlier, I could have been Peter Cheyney selling his publisher the idea for Lemmy Caution.

Amphetamines and Pearls—the title borrowed from Bob Dylan—was duly published by Sphere Books in 1976. John Knight’s gloriously pulpy cover design showing a seminaked stripper reflected in the curved blade of a large and dangerous-looking knife. 144 pages, 50,000 words, £500 advance against royalties. You do the math.

But, I hear you asking, is it any good?

Well, yes and no. Reading Amphetamines and Pearls and the other three books again after many years, there were sequences that left me pleasantly surprised and others that set my teeth on edge like chalk being dragged across a blackboard.

Chandler is a dangerous model: so tempting, so difficult to pull off. Once in a while, I managed a simile that works—phrases peeled from his lips like dead skin isn’t too bad—but, otherwise, they tend to fall flat. What I hope will come across to readers, though, is how much I enjoyed riffing on the familiar tropes of the private-eye novel—much as I have done more recently in my Jack Kiley stories—and how much fun it was to pay homage to the books and movies with which I’d grown up and which had been a clear inspiration. Inspiration I would do nothing to disguise—quite the opposite, really.

As an example, quite early on, there’s this:

What I needed now was a little honest routine. I remember reading in one of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels that he began the day by making coffee in a set and practiced way, each morning the same. It also said somewhere that Marlowe liked to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast but as far as I can recall it didn’t say how he did that.

What I did was this. I broke two eggs into a small saucepan, added a good-size chunk of butter, poured in a little off the top of a bottle of milk and finally ground in some sea salt and black pepper. Then I just stirred all of this over a medium heat, while I grilled some bacon to go with it.

They say that a sense of achievement is good for a man.

And later, this:

I didn’t know whether she was playing at being Mary Astor on purpose, or whether she’d seen The Maltese Falcon so many times she said the words unconsciously.

But I had seen it too.

Intertextuality. Isn’t that what they call that kind of thing? Metafiction, even?

Much of the success of the book depends on how the reader responds to its hero. In many respects, Scott Mitchell fits the formula: men are always pointing guns at him or sapping him from behind; women either want to slap his face or take him to bed or both. When it comes to handing out the rough stuff, he’s no slouch. Anything but. He’s the toughest and the best, after all. But, personally, I find him a little too down on himself and the world in general, too prone to self-pity. On the plus side, he does immediately recognize Thelonious Monk playing Duke Ellington, he knows the difference between Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, and he has a fondness for Bessie Smith.

The scenes in the novel that work best, for me at least, are those in which the attempts to sound and seem American are pulled back, letting the Englishness show through. That only makes sense: it’s what I know, rather than what I only learned secondhand. And what I know, of course, London aside, is the city of Nottingham, destined to be the home of the twelve novels featuring Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick.

It had been so long since I last read Amphetamines and Pearls that I’d forgotten that’s where quite a lot of the book is set. And in the chapter where Mitchell visits the city’s new central police station, there’s a description of urban police work that points the way pretty clearly towards the world Resnick would step into a dozen or so years later.

Men in uniform and out of it moved quietly around the building. Policemen doing their job with as much seeming efficiency as men who are worked too hard and paid too little can muster. From room to room they went, sifting the steadily gathering detritus of the city night: a group of drunken youths with colored scarves tied to their wrists and plastic-flowered pennants on their coats; the first few of the many prostitutes whose soiled bodies would spend the remainder of their working hours in custody; a couple of lads—not older than fifteen—who had been caught breaking into a tobacconist’s shop and beating up the owner when he discovered them; a sad queen who had announced his desires a little too loudly and obviously in the public lavatories of the city center; and the car thieves, the junkies, the down-and-outs.

You couldn’t work in the midst of all this without it getting to you. It didn’t matter how clean the building was, how new. The corruption of man was old, old, old.

And down these mean streets … well, you know the rest.

—John Harvey

London, December 2015

CHAPTER ONE

It was hot. The circles of darkening sweat that spread from my armpits reached almost to my waist; my new navy blue cotton briefs were welded to my body. Inside my shoes, my feet were carrying on an argument with pain that had started several hours earlier and never had they felt less like winning. When I shifted my position in the chair and lowered one foot to the floor, it sang back at me with a flat note of suffering.

I reached up my right hand and wiped away the moisture that dripped from my scalp. Before I had finished more had appeared. Like most things, it was a losing struggle. I gave up and allowed the lines of sweat to run into and through my eyebrows, from there to drip down on to my cheek, the side of my nose. When I couldn’t take the gradually increasing irritation any longer I shook my head and watched the drops fall on the blotter on my desk. This time they had met more than their match. I thought I knew how they felt.

It was something after four in the afternoon and I’d been on the go since that morning. Seven hours and much of it on my feet. Walking around, pretending to be looking casually in shop windows or at the dying fragments of roses in other people’s gardens; walking around or standing still; standing and watching; watching and waiting.

I don’t know what I was complaining about. That was how I earned my living. If living wasn’t too strong a word for what I did. I was a private detective.

All day I’d been out on a case. Following this guy’s wife as she went through her daily routine. A routine which he suspected to include more than a soupçon of infidelity. Though where she was going to get the desire from in that heat I couldn’t understand.

Her old man drove the Rover out of the garage at around eight thirty and she leaned her head through the window and gave him a good long kiss on the mouth. He headed off towards the city and she went back into the house. Half an hour later she opened the door to a smart young man in an off-the-peg suit and a ready-made smile. It was a little early for the man from the Pru, I thought, and it wasn’t the kind of area where the tally boys had to get up with the dawn in order to scrape in a few overdue payments.

She was still wearing her housecoat and there was a welcoming burst of cleavage to accompany her good morning smile. Okay, I thought, so my better days begin with scrambled eggs and orange juice, but out here in the land of plenty, who knows?

I got out of my car which was parked fifty yards down the road on the other side and walked up to the house. A neat gravel path led alongside the garage and into a hundred feet plus of garden. I have a way of walking on gravel that’s as soundless as treading on silk. It comes with years of practice.

They hadn’t gone upstairs, nor had they bothered to draw the curtains. You could have ridden a bike through the gap between them, never mind aimed the telephoto lens of a Pentax SP 1000. Oh yes, we professionals only use the best. Scott Mitchell’s Pentax, it will say when you open your colour supplement one of these fine Sundays and flip through the ads gazing at all those things you should have. That’s before you read in the news pages how you can’t afford them.

This lady could afford more than most and from the earnest look on the guy’s face he was explaining to her how she might make even more. There were some brochures open on his lap and some forms lying on top of one of those smart black brief cases that are too thin to take a decent-size sandwich. I snapped away for a few minutes, but without any enthusiasm. If this was voyeurism, it had all the eroticism of yesterday’s cold potatoes.

I went back to the car and waited for him to come out so that I could get a few shots of his face. It had all the smugness you’d expect from someone who’d made his first commission before his first cup of coffee.

I waited around some time while she took a quick bath or a shower or something. She was looking very new and shiny when she reappeared with a shopping bag and made for Kingston High Street. She was wearing a halter top over a loose skirt that finished somewhere around her knees. Her skin was a beautiful, even brown and she was showing a lot of it. Her hair was cut short and shone with a dull coppery colour. She had too much money in her purse and too much time on her hands. She went from shop to shop parading her sensuality as though it was next year’s original model.

The only thing was, nobody appeared to be buying. The hottest thing on view apart from the weather was a little