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Harry Fabian has a dream to become the top wrestling promoter in London, but he has a problem: he needs money. Not too much -- only one hundred quid -- but it might as well be a million because he needs the money by the end of the week. What's more, it is the height of the 1930s Depression, he lives in London's Soho, he makes money from selling his girlfriend to men, and the police are arresting pimps like him to clean up the streets for the imminent Coronation of George The Sixth.

Hunting for victims to blackmail and con out of money, Fabian moves through the clip joints, jazz clubs, wrestling gyms, bottle bars, and all-night cafés of 1930s London, spiraling further and further into the depths of immorality and depravity. And by the time his quest is over, Harry Fabian will have entered the tenth circle of the Inferno, dragging everybody he knows down with him... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"And Some Fools Say There's a God!"
This book was published in 1938. It's Gerald Kersh's best-known work, a memorable 20th century novel of the London netherworld and one of the better examples of British noir.

It depicted the fall of a small-time crook who'd do anything for money and the rise of an artist who struggled to protect his creativity. It blended a concern with depravity and morality with an exuberant style. It's been called a cross between Graham Greene and the American hard-boiled school.

The most memorable character was the crook, Harry Fabian, obsessed with his own reputation and desires, dreaming of the big time, needing always to impress. Linked to him were a number of other characters, with problems of their own. The book was set in the West End and depicted parts of the London netherworld with which Kersh was clearly familiar: a nightclub, a wrestling hall, prostitution, blackmail, seedy bars, middlemen working on the edge of fraud. This was where the writing seemed especially strong.

The author must have delighted in showing all the voices he could do: West End, Cockney, educated crook, middle-class suburbanite, Jewish businessman and working women -- and Fabian himself, a London native who liked speaking American. In one segment, the author even wrote from the point of view of a cat. Other sections excelled in showing the psychology of the morally flawed: a compulsive liar, a compulsive buyer, a gambler, and in describing assorted other bizarre characters. Great set-pieces included Fabian's search across the West End for a mark, a nightclub owner's explanation of a club's operation, a wholesaler's scramble to raise cash, two traders negotiating a deal, a shopping spree, a crazed visit to a club -- including a drunken shift forward to the morning -- a wrestling match, a desperate gambling match. This book showed me where Hubert Selby and many others must've drawn some inspiration.

In the second half of the book, the author seemed to rely increasingly on characters talking back and forth at each other, with less psychological insight and at times a bit more purple prose. The focus was shifted more frequently away from Fabian and over to the noble artist, which was necessary to complete the morality tale but diminished the thrill of the writing for me -- the author's skill lay so much more in depicting the bad than the good. And by the end, given the main character's grim trajectory through much of the book, it felt like the author had spared him the worst of what he deserved.

Excerpts:

"He had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long and cumulative experience of the customs of the City. I have mentioned how he could appraise a footstep. He could, by a similar method of spontaneous reasoning, read a face, interpret an expression, calculate how much money you were in the habit of spending, or even decide by the look of you which restaurant or café you would probably frequent. He saw London as a kind of Inferno--a series of concentric areas with Picadilly Circus as the ultimate center."

"Bagrag's Cellar is a dragnet through which the undercurrent of night life continually filters. It is choked with low organisms, pallid and distorted, unknown to the light of day, and not to be tolerated in healthy society . . . . Half-exhausted people throw up spasms of febrile energy: they rise in groups without purpose, move round, then sink back again, like stirred-up filth on the bottom of a pond . . . . To take a deep breath in Bagrag's Cellar, now, is like inhaling the combined vapors of a distillery, a dosshouse, and a burning tobacco factory."

"This woman had something about her that was indescribably terrifying. Imagine the death mask of Julius Caesar, plastered with rouge, and stuck with a pair of eyes as small, as flat, and as bright as newly cut cross sections of .38-caliber bullets; marked with eyebrows that ran together in a straight black bar: and surmounted by a million diabolical black hairs that sprang in a nightmarish cascade up out of her skull, like a dark fountain of accumulated wickedness squeezed out by the pressure of her corsets."

"Now, my precious; people love to see other people behaving like idiots, but not seeing themselves doing the same thing. No mirrors except in the lavatories, and there we're going to have pink mirrors, see? . . . . They mustn't see 'emselves in their true colors, my love. When they go out to be sick, let 'em look as if they're having a good time."

"Vi yawned, and from between her pale, painted lips there proceeded a breath such as might come from a pathological specimen in a jar, when the alcohol is evaporating . . . . Her head against the pillow was a study in all the indefinable pale colors of debauch. The pillow case was gray, but Vi's face was grayer, tinged with the chlorotic greeny-yellow of anemia. Rubbed smears of yesterday's rouge gave emphasis to this pallor. Under the laid-on red, her lips were pale pink, and her teeth appeared yellow in the daylight. The penciled lines of her eyebrows had been rubbed off on to the blanket; the metallic green paint with which she colored her eyelids had become mixed with the blue mascara of her lashes, in an unearthly and poisonous bruise color picked out with flecks of silver. This was trickling down into the hollows of her eyes. One of her false eyelashes had come loose, and swung precariously against her cheek as she blinked. She seemed to be liquefying, falling to pieces."

"Every film he had ever seen, and every book he had ever read, rushed together in his brain to form one blazing and magnificent composite, in which he, Fabian, fantastically enlarged, fantastically dressed, leaned backwards in a wild photomontage of champagne bubbles, limousines, diamonds, galloping horses, baize tables, and beautiful women; all whirling and weaving in a deluge of white and yellow chips, and large bank notes; an eternal reduplication of breasts and legs of very conceivable shape, size, and color."

"What was it? Was it that, for the first time in his life, he had become aware of the appalling burden of accumulating lies with which he loaded his soul from hour to hour--the closing coils of deceit which he spun about himself day after day? There passed through his mind a vision of life free from vanity, fiction, and subterfuge. . . a bygone period in his life when black was black and white was white; when one sinned, and confessed, and breathed again. 'Why do I always have to start these tales? They aren't necessary!' he said to himself."

Too tough for some.
He's a guy who'd blackmail a man with a dying wife; sacrifice an aging wrestler in a fight for a meagre profit; sell his prostitute girlfriend, whom he lives off, to white-slavers. He's Harry Fabian, one of London town's low-life, with a humble, street-trader brother that loves him all the same. ... Read more

Product Description
Venture into this alarmingly convincing world, meet the horse whosestubbornness changed history, or the man damned to everlasting love,or the murderer who confessed... and confessed... and confessed.Learn, too the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile, or what really happenedto Ambrose Bierce. And ponder, if you can, the case of Simple Simon,who lost the only important thing he had--and never even missed it.Lean back, relax, take a long look at the world of Kersh.You may never recover. ... Read more

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In London under the fog of war, a 10-year-old Jewish girl is murdered. The police have no clues and little interest, so crusader Asta Thundesley takes up the challenge, sifting through clues and gathering up suspects for a dinner party where... nothing is learned. Detective Turpin goes by the book, and finds himself with a stunning set... of dead ends. Fascinating example of life's perils by author Kersh (Night and the City), who reminds for every winner, there can be a ton of losers.

First published 1947. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Twisted mystery, not mystery with a twist
Gerald Kersh, favorite writer of Harlan Ellison, specialized in capturing the lowest strata of society.His story of a working-class neighborhood's search for a pedophilic killer, led by an amateur neighborhood sleuth, reads like a good tense mystery from, say, Cornell Woolrich.Right up to the end, when the story takes several increasingly disturbing turns that will leave you looking for some hemlock.And yet it's a realistic, painful depiction of the flaws of the human race.

Even deeper into the inferno
Night and the City, Kersh's best known novel, is indeed a trip through hell -- but only an upper ring, compared to the depths he enters in Prelude to a Certain Midnight. This book anticipates writers such as Hubert Selby in the examination of evil; its characters are very well drawn, the crime itself is hideous but mostly kept off the page, the society that allows it is dissected with unflinching attention. Kersh does spin incredibly strong sentences, and often touches the bottom of his characters' souls. But no picnics or fairy tales here. Tough stuff. ... Read more

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Brilliant Suspense Novel--About a few Men who Wanted the World for Themselves!

Kersh's classic about unlikely investigators into the diabolical schemes of men beyond the law. First published 1953. ... Read more

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This book contains Gerald Kersh's short stories:The Queen of Pig IslandFrozen BeautyThe Brighton MonsterMen Without Bones"Busto Is A Ghost Too Mean To Give Us A Fright!"The Spe and the MysteryThe King Who Collected ClocksBone for DebunkersA Lucky Day For the BoarVoices in th Dust of AnnanWhatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?Preceded by an introducted titled "Kersh, the Demon Prince" by Harlan Ellison. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Certainly odd, definitely entertaining, very well written
This little treasure from 1945 is still fresh today with its well spun yarns of the peculiar and the strange.Reading this slim volume is like sitting down with a stranger and hearing one odd yard after another: it's a story-telling fest with intimate detail and surreal suggestion.Tale-spinning shop owners, shipwrecked circus freaks, a young murderess, racial implications and early surgery techniques.

It's witty, charming, morbid at times, freakish, and most certainly eye-opening.I read the entire book in less than a day; I couldn't get enough of the tale-telling.The author writes, "Here is food for thought, but I do not like the thought it feeds."Some of the tales will make you uncomfortable, but squirming in your easy chair while sipping that comforting cocoa is part of the charm of the book.

Table Of Contents:
· Seed Of Destruction
· Frozen Beauty
· Reflections In A Tablespoon
· The Crewel Needle
· The Sympathetic Souse
· The Queen Of Pig Island
· Prophet Without Honor
· The Beggar's Stone
· The Brighton Monster
· The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy
· Fantasy Of A Hunted Man
· The Gentleman All In Black
· The Eye

My favorite was The Queen Of Pig Island, a classic tale of shipwrecked circus freaks and how they survived ... and then interacted.The Sympathetic Souse has a little surprise at the end, The Crewel Needle finds horror in an unlikely source, followed by ruin.I loved Prophet Without Honor not just for the unusual aspect but for the yarn itself.There isn't one bad tale in this book.It's also surprising how forward thinking Mr. Kersh was, exploring events that hadn't happened yet and turning out fairly accurate in today's world (though with that edgy twist).

My copy was old and frail, and I found myself handling the book like a newborn, careful and gentle, while just wanting to bury myself into it and absorb all the good qualities, not unlike blowing on a baby's belly.

The blurbs on the back of the book use such words as 'provocative', 'titillating', 'enthralling', 'brilliant', 'wildly funny', and 'sinister'.All these proclamations hold true, this is really a book that is not to be missed by any fan of Horror, SciFi, or Fantasy.My word to describe 'On An Odd Note' would be 'absorbing'.It's a book you won't be able to put down.Enjoy!
... Read more

Product Description
An amazing comic novel by Kersh (Night and The City). It's the tale of a young man who enters the peculiar underworld of Cockney Theatre, and quickly finds himself wrapped up in scams, treachery, nitro-glycerine and midgets.

This bawdy, rollicking tale, featuring in Sam Yudenow the most fittingly peculiar dialogue since Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop graced the stage, is the last to be written by Kersh.

Published in 1957, only a year after The Ginger Man's runaway success in London, the work may have suffered by its release from a mainstream UK publisher. (Where were the censors?)

So to guarantee success this time around, in printing Fowlers End, we've gone the extra mile and made sure to have ads in back for some of the most spectular Olympia titles. Kersh deserves no less. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A GAME OF TWO HALVES
This novel is now available in a new edition with a foreword by no less than Michael Moorcock, who finds it a work of outstanding humour, a view that enjoys the eminent endorsement of Anthony Burgess. I can see what they mean, but it's not my own kind of humour. I thought I was never going to laugh until near the end, when I managed a wan smile at the description of the waiters in the restaurant, and then, to my own surprise, a genuine laugh during the fight in the pub that takes place on the last few pages.

The book was first published in 1958, and I infer from the references to unrest in Cyprus that the setting must have been around then. The locale has an imaginary name, but it's not some imaginary place, nor is it any `furthest corner of London' as the blurb has it. It is the area adjacent to King's Cross, within walking distance of Mayfair and Belgravia, still exceedingly seedy when I last saw it several years ago. I gladly concede that Fowlers End is a very skilful piece of work. It captures the run-down feel of the area and parodies its sleazy denizens very well indeed. The plot in general is well held together, with a couple of nice surprises to round it off. The characters are memorable and up to a point original, and the writing is polished and has a general feel of `quality'. What gets up my nose is the author's attitude, which is more than slightly patronising and superior.

The book seems to me to improve sharply somewhere around the half-way point, which is precisely where the author stops trying to be so self-consciously funny. At the same point he begins to develop the persona of his narrator, something that the story was beginning to need rather badly as the other characters are all stereotypes and the action is more a string of episodes than a fully architected plot. Too much of the book, particularly the first half of it, consists of Kersh showing us how clever he is. On top of that, he doesn't always seem to me to know how much of a good thing is enough. Even the sharp and witty description of the stately but decrepit waiters goes on just a little too long. What I find downright objectionable is the portrayal of Sam Yudenow - Kersh captures the accent extremely well, and the typical speech-solecisms, but he overdoes it more than somewhat. It all has the feel of an educated man mocking an uneducated one for his lack of education, and Kersh keeps at it with tasteless and tedious persistence over the first couple of chapters. This is the worst instance, but there is a slightly unpleasant atmosphere of de haut en bas that runs through the novel as a whole. I'm not looking for `human sympathy' by any means - that would ruin Swift or Juvenal. What I feel is that if Kersh wants to pose as being as superior as this he needs to actually be a bit more superior in the first place. His narrator doesn't have the real personality or distinctiveness of, say, Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon or Maurice Allington (to say nothing of, say, Horace Rumpole), and one real oddity is that his alleged facial ugliness is neither here nor there in the plot - nothing in particular is made of it. Kersh's cynicism is rather average too, and in general his phrases and apercus are not as good as he evidently thinks they are. My recollection kept reverting to how that sort of thing is better done elsewhere, and when I came to the bit about the Eccles-cakes it was simply painful to recall the sermon in The Way of All Flesh.

It's a fluent and easy read, although I reached the end without regret. I didn't roll in any aisles but remained slumped with a feeling of slight distaste in my armchair. However the weight of more distinguished opinion is against me, and if you can find the first half of the book more tolerable than I did - particularly if you think it's funny - this may be a book you will enjoy. Have a good second half. If you were beginning to wonder why there is a glossary of rhyming slang at the start, it is needed for one solitary song near the end and nowhere else at all in the entire 300-odd pages. ... Read more

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A gangster, a Russian prince, a millionairess, a cocaine-sniffing English lord, a film producer, a singer, a doctor, an entomologist, boxer and several others are trapped in an island cavern by a rock fall; not all survive. ... Read more