Ballad of a Dead Nobody

By Liza Cody

Elly Astoria had a miraculous musical talent. As a little girl she taught herself to play guitar and keyboard so that she could feed herself and her junkie mother. One rainy night she was spotted singing and playing by the founder of an indy womens band. Later, cleaned up and better fed, she caught the eye of her future manager and his creepy sister. It should have been a rags-to-riches story. Instead Ellys career was cut short by her perverted and grisly murder.

Years after her death it looks as if Ellys life has been overlooked. If anyone deserves rediscovery and a biography, its Elly. Clearly there is a story to be told and a mystery to be solved. But how?

About Anna Lee

Electric with suspense, fast and funny...
Publishers Weekly

Loud hurrahs... story wonderfully alive, truly tense, dialogue sharp and accurate!
HRF Keating, The Times

About Eva Wylie

A staggering achievement... A breath-taking tour de force.
Sara Paretsky

...Eva is a wondrous creation an incorrigible innocent in a story that crackles with energy. Super Cody.
Kirkus Reviews

About Gimme More

Any one with the slightest interest in the world of music will ?nd this a thriller they wont want to put down.
Anthony Morris

Probably the greatest rocknroll novel ever.
Nick Johnstone, uncut

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450283243

Book preview

For MZL, without whose skill as a baker

this book would never have been cooked.

Contents

The Nobody

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Twenty-Five Years Later – the Tribe of the Dumped

Sarah and the Yama –

from Amy’s recorded interview for the biography

Harold and the Martin –

from Amy’s recorded interview for the biography

Excerpt from a letter from Dr. S.L. Ralston –

Royal College of Music – from Amy’s files

Jesse Astoria, The Mother –

5 and a Bit Interviews – from Amy’s recordings

Amy Finds Her Subject

The Bag Baby and the Band

The Biography – Sample Pages from Chapter 3

Pages from Carol’s papers

The Husband

Resentment

Amy’s Fantasy Funeral

A sample chapter – The Biographer

Recognises Resentment for the First Time

Pages from Carol’s papers

Toothbrushes

Pages from Carol’s papers

Verbatim Transcription of a recording of Ex-PC Charlene Brown and Sergeant Bradley McFall.

From Amy’s files.

Nottingham

Pages from Carol’s Papers

Boyd

Voices On Walls – from the biography

Caz Carter – Royal Albert Hall

Wages

Memory

The Biographer Decides to Face the Central Issue

Listening To Finn

Transcription of recorded interviews with

Ex DC Sue Smith & Ex DS Jimmy Knight

Boyd’s sister, Jaquie – edited transcription of a recorded interview

I Killed Elly Astoria: Confession of a Pop Star

Talking to Finn Again

Freddy Remembers – from Amy’s recordings

Yvonne speaks for the first time –

edited transcript from Amy’s recordings

Kenny Sercombe isn’t bitter – Edited Transcript

Finn, As Explained by an Urban Hippie

Ma and Mister

Ayisha’s Just Fine

The Man Who Makes Cakes

Deals

One Voicemail and Two Emails

Elly Astoria’s Teenage Fan Club – Edited Transcript

Three More Emails – Three Dodgy Proposals

A Bass Player Laughs and Cries

One Tantalising Email

Overweight and Ornery

The Facts of Life

Gentleman Julius –

Edited transcript of a recorded interview

Lead Vocals: Maddie Adaire

One Short Email and Three Short Phone Messages

All the alibis – Edited Transcript

A Bath, a Dream and a Phonecall

Graham Bedford Responds Positively To Chocolate

Self-Deception in Las Vegas

Jetlag

Fantasy

Small Winners

Cheap and Bogus

Two Unicorns

Stuart’s Idea

Pages From Carol’s Papers

Dynamite

Not a Fighter

Stolen Goods

Interview with a White Witch

Leaving Las Vegas

Epilogue

Breakfast at a Guest House in South Devon

About the author

The Nobody

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Elly turns the key with numb fingers and lets herself into the dark hallway. The light bulb burned out eighteen months ago. There is no spare, no stepladder for Elly to climb even if she bought one. As far as little Elly is concerned the hall has always been dark.

She carries the shopping to the kitchen. Milk goes in the smelly fridge. The rest stays in the plastic bag. She makes two cups of tea, fishes the crushed box of biscuits out from under the dented cans of beans, and walks back down the dark hall. At the bottom of the stairs she pauses, listening. There’s no sound from the sitting-room where her mother sleeps, but the room seems to be breathing. She sits on the stairs, carefully placing a cup of tea on either side of her. She opens the box of biscuits and chooses, by touch, five which are nearly not broken. The remainder she leaves next to a cup of tea. She taps on the door with the toe of her sneaker. Then she goes upstairs with her own cup and the five biscuits. She listens, and hears her mother downstairs: the shuffling footsteps, the door opening, the tremble of cup on saucer, the rustle of packaging, the door closing. No voices. Nobody calls, shouts or cries. All is well.

At this time of evening, other children Elly’s age are home from school. They are doing what children do: eating, watching TV, fighting with parents and siblings, listening to music, avoiding homework or hitting the books, hitting the phone. All over London kids assert their right to drain the National Grid.

Elly lights three candles. She holds a battery powered Radio Shack cassette tape recorder – price, £3, from a car boot sale. She presses the play button and listens to ‘She’s A Rainbow’ from a 60’s compilation tape – 50p, from a market stall. Her left hand reaches out and switches on a small battery-powered Yamaha keyboard – free, from a school clearout – her fingers make the shape of a B flat chord. She doesn’t think about it: her fingers follow the sequence: B flat, E flat, B flat and F seven. Her conscious mind is engaged with the words and the baroque sound of the piano. How hard will it be to make something similar on a guitar? Will the reward justify the effort?

On the whole, pretty 60’s songs do very well for Elly. She has a pitch in the subway, and sometimes the older people stop to listen. Sometimes they talk to her, amazed that a kid would bother to learn the songs that made their hearts beat faster so many years ago. They tell her where they were when they first heard ‘Norwegian Wood,’ and who they were with. Their eyes change to the colour of innocence and there’s that satisfying clunk of coins dropping into the guitar case. Then Elly smiles shyly and plays ‘Thank You for the Music’ to warm the chilly air and make the people forget why they usually hurry through the tunnel.

This is what Elly does while the kids her own age are at school. Later, when they are in bed, she takes a position where the people leaving the Green Man pub and the Roxy Cinema converge. Now she plays contemporary songs from the 80’s and does equally well in a shorter time.

Strangely, Elly has a near perfect school attendance record: they won’t catch her that way. She is the invisible child who arrives religiously and answers when her name is called at Registration. After the occasions when she’s absent there is always a note. If her class teacher were ever to collect and reread the notes he would be surprised to see that Elly’s excuse is rarely that of her own illness. The most usual note reads, ‘Please excuse Ellena, she is taking me to the surgery today. Signed, Jesse Astoria.’ He might then ask himself what kind of mother needs a little girl of eleven to take her to see a doctor, but even then he would probably have neither the time nor energy to answer his own question.

Every now and then, Elly catches cold, but she has never been seriously ill. Nor has she been injured. Sometimes she has been pushed to the ground and her money stolen. But more often, these days, she smells the rusty whiff of physical danger before it happens, and runs. She’s small and fast, and she can disappear into a crowd with bewildering speed. Disappearing is her only other talent. It’s her survival mechanism.

She’s not strong enough to fight, so if another busker wants her pitch, she slides away. If any of the many thieves and bullies want her money she runs away, saving herself and her guitar. Most of her cash, in any case, is stashed in the various pockets of her many coats and jackets. The only person who takes it regularly is her mother.

She doesn’t worry much about money: there is always enough somewhere to buy bread, a can of soup or beans, a packet of broken biscuits to share with Jesse. Keeping house for her mother is easy. She can make toast. She can heat soup. She can fry an egg. Jesse isn’t fussy, and often she isn’t even hungry. Food isn’t what sustains Jesse, and although Elly always leaves at least half of whatever she cooks at the bottom of the staircase, often she will eat it herself, cold, a few hours later when she comes down and finds it untouched.

She does not experience any of this as abnormal because she does not compare or contrast. She doesn’t really think at all. Her head is full of sounds and pictures which she can recall without any trouble, but she has no method of evaluation. The only time she lived with clean clothes, regular hot food, early bedtimes, constant supervision by a responsible adult, was the time Jesse went away. Was taken away. Was dragged away screaming. Elly screamed too. She can remember the sound, and sometimes even now she can hear it in her sleep.

No one else heard. She knew that at the time, because no one rescued Jesse. No one brought her back to Elly. And later, when the foster father trapped her in that tight white shiny-bright bathroom no one heard, even though there were four others outside a white door that wasn’t locked.

‘She comes in colours everywhere,’ Elly sings in her head. ‘She combs her…’ Fingers change shape, change chord. ‘…hair. She’s like a rainbow.’ She smiles. It’s a pretty, plaintive love song and it should earn a few coins.

She stops to cram a biscuit in her mouth and rewind the tape back to the start of the track. She’s completely happy. The ornate twiddles of the introduction won’t transpose easily to the guitar, but she’ll find a way.

She doesn’t even think about her own hair with its tight ringlets and crazy kinks which she never combs and seldom washes. This song is not about her – she’s nobody’s rainbow. The pictures in her head are of sparkling coloured shapes which dance in a pattern to a precise rhythm. In the background, hazily, are castles and towers and boys and girls with silky yellow hair, all light and airy, and as remote from Elly’s bedroom as a scene could possibly be. But of course Elly is not living in her bedroom with its torn lino, moth-eaten curtain and piles of hand-me-down clothes. Elly is dancing with intricate patterns of coloured sparkles. Because she can’t see herself, she is never sorry for herself.

Twenty-Five Years Later – the Tribe of the Dumped

Once there was a woman, not old nor young, not short nor tall, not stunning nor ugly. But she can look better than she does today. Her skin is dry and dull because she can’t be bothered to exfoliate or moisturise. Her posture is bad because she can’t face the world with her chin up and her shoulders back. She would benefit from a new bra but she can’t bear to go to a changing room and look at her own unloved body.

Today, though, Amy is being braver than usual. Today she has been to the supermarket and restocked her kitchen. She has faced the dreadful fact that she is shopping for one and that her unloved body needs food.

This tiny spasm of courage takes Amy further – to a coffee shop where she sits alone by the window with only a newspaper for company. She feels an ache in her shoulders and spine and realises that this is because it hurts to sit upright. She would rather curl up under the table than be seen. She thinks that she looks like a dumped woman. Anyone who sees her may point a derisive finger and cat-call – This is the woman Craig dumped, ha-ha. He was tired of her. He found someone younger, more glamorous, more talented. Hotter.

She is ashamed and it’s killing her.

She stares unseeing at the review section of her paper and tries to evaluate how much time, energy and love she has wasted on Craig. When she met him, her dream was to be a writer. But Craig already was a writer, a good one, a successful one. She thought she could learn from him; and she did learn. She learned to cook for a writer, clean for a writer, organise accounts and dinner parties for a writer. Then he fired her.

And now she must learn how to stop grieving for a writer. She must learn how to begin her own work and live her own life.

It’s a truth, universally acknowledged, that members of the large sad tribe of the dumped have to be at their bravest just at that point in their lives when they are most scared and ashamed. Is it any wonder that therapists have long waiting lists? Everyone needs emotional rescue at one time or another. The dumped need it most urgently.

Sometimes though, grace comes when it’s least expected. For this woman in this particular coffee shop grace comes in the form of a song. The song is ‘See Jesse Tomorrow’. It was written over twenty years ago by a teenager called Elly Astoria who was famous for a brief meteoric success and more famous for the grotesque manner of her death.

This song, with its achingly beautiful melody and its broken-hearted lyrics, makes the woman bow her head behind her paper and weep. But it also offers the alchemy which will turn Amy from a dumped, grieving, lost soul into a biographer.

Sarah and the Yama –

from Amy’s recorded interview for the biography

Sarah told it this way: ‘Elly was just another kid. The ones you notice are the loud ones, the rough ones, the cry-babies. Everyone says you should be able to identify a dyslexic from year dot. But how? None of them can spell. They all write backwards. They’re all clumsy and disorganised. The mothers send some of them to school without breakfast. Some of them have hardly slept the night before. God, there was one mother, she had twin girls, three days out of five they weren’t even wearing knickers. When I mentioned it, she sent them to school in their pyjamas. You dress them, she said. Maybe you can afford to.’

If one run-down junior school in North London was a metaphor for society in general, Sarah reasoned, then it was no surprise that only the very bad or the very good got noticed. And therefore, she excused herself, if she didn’t notice Elly she was only behaving like society in general. Human beings, she thought, were conditioned to respond most strongly to extremes. The average is not remarkable and thus is not remarked on.

Then two things happened. The first occurred when Sarah was put in charge of music for the Christmas pageant, and the second at the beginning of the next school term.

Three carols were chosen: ‘While Shepherds Watched,’ ‘Away in a Manger,’ and ‘Once in Royal.’ If you were not pretty enough to be Mary, not tall enough to be Joseph, not bright enough to learn a part or too shy to speak in public, you were dumped in the heavenly choir and Sarah taught you carols.

‘Every child must have a part,’ intoned Miss Wilson, the head, even though she and all the other teachers were fully aware that by the time most of the Muslims, Hindus, Parsees had withdrawn their children from the pageant a lot of children would be unemployed.

Unremarkable Elly was of course in the choir where she would have languished in the back row except that Sarah suddenly became aware that she had on her hands the unusual phenomenon of a seven-year-old with perfect pitch.

It was a Friday at the end of a particularly trying week. A relief teacher collapsed with flu and Sarah was forced to cope with a bolshie mixed-age group twice the size of what she was expecting. She had just settled the class and was beginning to teach ‘Away in a Manger’ when a small, anxious presence materialised at her side.

‘It hurts my ears,’ Elly said, pointing to the heavenly rabble and at the piano keys. ‘They aren’t sounding the same song,’ she said.

‘It’s a carol,’ Sarah said. ‘We’re only just learning it. We can’t expect to get everything right first time, can we?’

‘But…’ Elly whispered. She had paled to a sickly yellow tan and was twisting the hem of her grubby sweatshirt into a tight spiral. Sarah had never seen her so agitated. In fact she had never known her to demand attention at all. The situation, however perplexing, would have to be dealt with, but meanwhile the heavenly mob was losing concentration.

‘All right, Elly,’ Sarah said soothingly. ‘Go back to your place now and we’ll sort it out later. Okay? Come on, children, let’s start again: one, two, three, Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus… Oh dear, oh dear.’

For Elly, far from going back to her place, began to retch at the sound of the first chord and threw up next to the piano stool just as Sarah got to the ‘Little Lord Jesus.’ She was sent to the sick room.

Sarah gritted her teeth, cleared up the mess and regained some control. Elly came back.

‘I can’t see anything wrong with her ears,’ said Mrs Jefferies, who accompanied her. ‘Perhaps it was lunch, or maybe it’s the flu.’

From then until the end of class, Elly sat as far away from the piano as she could with her hands over her ears, apparently singing to herself.

‘She didn’t seem to be ill,’ Sarah explained to Miss Wilson later. ‘She just looked a bit bonkers, like a lunatic in an asylum, rocking and going la-la-la for a full fifteen minutes.’

‘Disturbed family background,’ Miss Wilson said, without looking up. ‘There’s no father that I know of.’

‘Well of course I spoke to her afterwards, but it was like wringing blood out of a stone. She’s not exactly advanced in communication skills, is she? No, as far as I could gather it was the singing…’

‘So that’s what the racket was,’ bellowed Mrs Jefferies.

‘She says there’s something wrong with the piano.’

‘Well, she’s right about that,’ sighed Miss Wilson. ‘It hasn’t been tuned for ages. You know, maybe we should put in for one of those electric keyboards. They never have to be tuned, do they?’

‘Well, it really seemed to distress her,’ Sarah persisted. ‘I wish I didn’t have to teach music.’ She played the piano but not well, and she was most confident when there were no black notes to play. Even so she made a lot of mistakes.

‘No choice,’ Miss Wilson said firmly. ‘You’re the only one with so much as a Grade Two certificate. Don’t worry, music doesn’t matter.’

It mattered to Elly though. When Sarah asked her she prodded the B note, the D and a G and said they didn’t hum right. A basic G chord, Sarah thought. ‘What should they sound like?’ she asked. And Elly sang B, D and G, then D, G, B, then G, B, D. Then she sang C, D, E, F and G and pointed to the piano G. Sarah played C, D, E, F, G while Elly sang it. Elly and the piano came to different conclusions, and Elly wrinkled her nose as if someone had presented her with a truly sickening smell. Sarah could hear that the two Gs were a bit different but she couldn’t tell which one was correct.

That night she called a friend who had been to the Guildhall School of Music and played jazz in pubs.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Borrow my little Yamaha – I hardly ever use it.’

Two days later, at lunch break, Jimmy brought the little Yamaha and Sarah called Elly in from the playground. Elly and the Yamaha agreed. Elly beamed. Elly and the Yamaha disagreed with the piano. Elly grimaced.

‘Interesting,’ said Jimmy. He played a simple phrase; Elly copied it exactly. He played a longer, more complex one; Elly sang it with no difficulty at all. He started a major scale; Elly finished it, note perfect. He asked her to supply the missing notes in major, minor and diminished chords; she grinned as if she’d never had so much fun in her life. He played ‘Fine and Mellow’; she stood at his elbow, eyes like saucepan lids watching his hands.

Then break was over and Jimmy left. But the Yamaha stayed on indefinite loan. ‘She’s got perfect pitch,’ Jimmy said, ‘and all the intervals are in her head, lucky little cow. I wonder where she got that from. Are her parents musical?’

Sarah didn’t know.

‘Well, ears like that don’t grow on trees,’ he said. ‘Only seven years old? Someone should take her in hand.’

‘Fat chance,’ said Sarah. ‘You saw her. How much money would you say was in that family? How much interest? She wears the same dirty clothes day after day. She needs healthy food and a good pair of shoes, but I don’t suppose she’ll get them either.’

At the beginning of the Spring Term, however, Elly appeared wearing clean clothes and a new pair of sandals. She was towed in by a burly social worker and a dumpy woman with spectacles and a thin ponytail. Elly was not happy.

‘How are you, Elly dear?’ Sarah asked, worried. ‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’

‘My mum’s gone,’ Elly whispered.

‘Oh dear. Where?’ Sarah asked unwisely.

‘To a big house,’ Elly said, twisting a button on her clean, blue cardigan. ‘It hasn’t got any doors so she can’t come back.’

Those were the last words Elly spoke for the whole of the Spring Term and half of the next. The grubby, quiet little girl with perfect pitch became spotless and silent. And she seemed to shrink into her perfectly laundered clothes.

It was not remarkable for a child at All Saints Junior to have a parent in prison. Sarah could have named a dozen. She could have named a handful, too, who were being temporarily fostered. What she had not witnessed before was the sight of a child slowly fading away.

‘Usually,’ she said to Mrs Jefferies, ‘they show behavioural problems: they fight, they cry, they start wetting themselves.’

‘Takes all sorts,’ said Mrs Jefferies. ‘When you’ve had as much experience as I have you’ll count yourself lucky.’

‘Describe,’ said Miss Wilson without looking up.

‘It’s not as if she isn’t attending,’ Sarah told her. ‘She does everything she’s asked, when she’s asked. But, well, even the drawing and painting, it’s getting smaller and smaller.’

‘Any disturbing pictures?’

‘No. If we’re doing portraits, she does portraits. If we’re doing animals, she does animals. It’s not that sort of problem. It’s more that she seems to be shrinking and she was always a bit small for her age.’

‘I expect she’s just missing her mother,’ said Miss Wilson. ‘But I’ll talk to the social worker if you like.’

‘Which one is Elly?’ asked Mrs Jefferies.

How would you describe her? Sarah thought. Small? Mixed-race? Shy? There were no distinguishing features except for those ears. Even when Sarah gave herself instructions like, ‘Must try to draw Elly out today,’ she found that at the end of the day she’d forgotten. Her time and attention was taken by the children who fought for it.

At least she wasn’t being picked on yet: the rampant bullies didn’t notice her either. The insignificant had become invisible.

But one day, while supervising morning break, Sarah saw Elly hanging around alone on the edge of the playground apparently looking in one of the windows. She went over. Elly turned towards her and immediately began to twist the hem of her jacket looking for all the world like a caught criminal.

‘What is it, Elly?’

Silence. Sarah leaned against the wall, casual, in case focussing on Elly might make her even more withdrawn. After a while Elly turned back to the window, and out of the corner of her eye, Sarah saw a finger reach out and Elly began to write on the wet pane of glass. Sarah whipped her head round and quick as a bird Elly wiped the glass with her sleeve. But not before Sarah saw clumsy crippled letters which read YA MA.

‘Oh Elly,’ Sarah cried, delighted with herself, ‘the Yamaha! You want the Yamaha.’

But Elly, having erased the message, now erased herself and the spot under the window was empty. This time Sarah was determined not to let an opportunity slip and she found Elly in another obscure corner. Taking her by the hand she led the child through the cloakroom, past the hall to the small windowless room that was used to store equipment. She set the keyboard on its stand, plugged it in and turned it on.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘You can play with it till the end of the break.’

Elly stood, saying nothing, doing nothing, looking stupid.

‘Go on,’ Sarah said, giving her a little push. Then, nudged by another small inspiration, she quietly left the room, closing the door behind her.

An hour later, halfway through Nature, Sarah realised that this time there was a very good reason for not noticing Elly: Elly was not in the class. She left the other children copying pictures of flowers and went back to the storeroom. There she found that the little girl had lifted the keyboard from its stand. It was now on the floor and Elly was seated cross-legged huddled over the keys. The volume was turned down so low Sarah could barely hear that Elly was playing the same chords and scales Jimmy had played for her. She was so concentrated, so engrossed that she didn’t look like a child at all. Rather it was as if Sarah were interrupting a very small adult at work.

Discomfited, Sarah said, ‘Back to class now, Elly, you’ve been here for too long.’ To her dismay she saw the clear, focussed brown eyes cloud with uncertainty, guilt and anxiety. Elly scrambled to her feet, bumping into a backless chair, knocking her elbow on a broken desk, and slid out of the open door without a word.

‘YAMA,’ Sarah muttered, making it rhyme with llama.

From then on, until the end of the Summer Term when Elly ceased to be in her class, Sarah felt more comfortable about Elly. She thought she had found her a refuge in the storeroom. And if she wasn’t talking to human beings, at least, in her own peculiar way, Elly was communicating with the Yama. It was not as if music therapy became the magic that brought her out of her shell and into the rowdy world of education. It simply prevented her from slipping further away.

Anyway, after six months, she returned to her previous grubby appearance, so presumably her mother had come back home. And although she was always one of those children who never willingly answered a question she did begin to talk again. And maybe the mother employed someone to give her otherwise neglected little daughter piano lessons, because when the Christmas pageant came round again, Sarah found, to her relief, that Elly could play ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘Once in Royal’ better than she could. She would sit on the floor at the back of the stage with her beloved Yama in front of her and accompany the ghastly, atonal choir. Of course she looked like a diminutive pile of dirty old clothes but she did leave Sarah free to teach the words properly and concentrate on important things like angel’s wings, breaking up fights and pacifying tantrums.

N.B. Amy’s note to herself – according to Brewer, in Hindu mythology, Yama was the first of the dead and born of the sun. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead it is said that if you are very unlucky after death, Yama will chop off your head, suck out your brains and drink your blood. I don’t suppose this is relevant enough to include?

Harold and the Martin –

from Amy’s recorded interview for the biography

‘I suppose you could say it was me showed her the way.’ That’s what Harold Chapman said. ‘In all ignorance, of course.’ He was a fair-minded man who only took credit when he thought it was due. Which should be the stock-in-trade of a pawn broker, he reckoned, but not many of his customers would believe it. They probably wouldn’t believe, either, that he was not a wealthy man. But when he went out of business two years ago, the only taker for his premises on the Seven Sisters Road had been a charity shop on a short-term lease.

‘Young man’s game,’ he said. ‘Besides no one wants to redeem anything anymore. Redeeming’s gone out of style. They’d rather sell than hock, and then buy brand new when they’re flush. No, it was a junk shop. Money lending’s a different ballgame now.’

So, a junk shop it was – a tatty, dusty, cluttered way-station in the life of thousands of objects too crummy to keep, but too good to dump. Amongst which was a scratched, slightly warped Martin guitar.

‘It was damaged goods – dirt cheap,’ Harold remembered, ‘but she couldn’t afford it. I took it down off the wall for her. She’s only a little thing and she couldn’t reach. Don’t know why I bothered, really. Must’ve been those big brown eyes.’

It was a funny transaction, one which lasted three months and which was clearly hugely important to Elly.

‘I didn’t pay much attention,’ Harold said. ‘Tell you the truth I thought she was wasting my time. She was in the shop for nearly an hour, and she sat on a Moroccan leather pouf tuning the damn thing and playing so quiet I could hardly hear. Then she gets up and comes to the counter. She wants the guitar, she says, but she hasn’t got the money. Can she pay by instalments? I’m not a hire purchase agreement, I said. That instrument doesn’t leave this shop without you pay the full asking price. And I took the guitar back and hung it on the wall where she couldn’t touch it. And that was that as far as I was concerned.’

But that was not

Reviews for Ballad of a Dead Nobody

[smik_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Liza Cody is an author who went off the radar for the first decade of this century. I do remember reading BUCKET NUT and MONKEY WRENCH when they were published twent years ago. I think I also read some of her Anna Lee series.This book though was quite different to what I expected. The structure is a series of recorded interviews, excerpts from letters, emails and telephone messages which Amy makes in her quest to write a book that will make her mark in the world. Once she settles on the idea of a biography about Elly Astoria, Amy discovers that there is bit more to being a biographer than just collecting material. What do you do about the gaps where you haven't a clue where the truth lies? For example no one was ever charged with Elly's murder. Is a biographer a detective too?Amy's quest takes her to tracking down members of MotherHood, the band Elly was "adopted" by, and she makes some odd discoveries. The band broke up straight after Elly's death and went their separate ways, although they and Elly's agents continued to get income from recordings and performance rights.There was a point when I nearly gave up on reading the book. It began to seem rather long winded and disjointed and Amy seemed no closer to the truth. I'm glad I didn't give up though.

[elkiedee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Liza Cody is a wonderful writer and I'm sad that this hasn't been published by a proper publisher. It's well written and involving but the end is a bit of a disappointment, but it's still worth reading and currently a good value download (I read it on a Kindle).

[nocto_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I agree with everything Luci has said. I loved Liza Cody's books when I read them - mostly in the 90s before I started keeping a booklog - and especially Rift which was one of those stories that stayed with me for years afterwards. It's sad that she doesn't have a proper publisher. I love the way Cody invents a songwriter character and meshes her into the real music world of the 80s, the story oozes authenticity. This would have been a great book with a bit of editing, as it is it's a decent read but left me confused.