Quick Hits–Paul D. Brazill

This post intro­duces some­thing I hope will become a fea­ture here at Fried Chick­en and Cof­fee, quick inter­views with writ­ers in the crime or rural/Appalachian fic­tion scenes, and short takes on what­ev­er writ­ers I'm obsessed with at the moment. First on this list is Paul D. Brazill, whose work I've known of for some time via Twit­ter and oth­er places. His 2012 arti­cle Brit Grit intro­duced me to a num­ber of new writ­ers on the oth­er side of the pond, and I've asked him just a a few ques­tions here, not want­i­ng to take up too much of his valu­able writ­ing and teach­ing time.

Paul D. Brazill's books include A Case Of Noir, Guns Of Brix­ton, Too Many Crooks, and Kill Me Quick! He was born in Eng­land and lives in Poland. His writ­ing has been trans­lat­ed into Ital­ian, Ger­man and Slovene. He has had stuff pub­lished in var­i­ous mag­a­zines and antholo­gies, includ­ing The Mam­moth Books of Best British Crime. 

In your 2012 Brit Grit blog post, you ref­er­ence Ted Lewis as the father of the move­ment. In what ways do you see his lin­eage in today's crop of writers?

I think it’s in the tim­bre of the writ­ing — peo­ple like Ray Banks, Char­lie Williams and Allan Guthrie, for exam­ple, have a strong sense of the absurd. The ridicu­lous­ness of every­day life. There is also a real focus on char­ac­ter – minor char­ac­ters, the set­tings, the dia­logue, are all well-drawn. 

I’ve said before that I think the dif­fer­ence between crime fic­tion and noir is that crime fic­tion is about bring­ing order to chaos and noir is about bring­ing chaos to order. Or even mak­ing the chaot­ic more so!

So, Brit Grit is clos­er to noir, I think, since even the most real­is­tic police pro­ce­dur­al is still a pater­nal pat on the head. 

You men­tion Gareth Spark and Paul Heat­ley as two cur­rent exem­plars. Which books of theirs do you rec­om­mend? Would you name some oth­er small press prac­ti­tion­ers who should be bet­ter known?

Marwick’s Reck­on­ing by Gareth Spark and An Eye For An Eye by Paul Heat­ley are both great and are pub­lished by Near To The Knuck­le who have also pub­lished Ian Ayris’ bril­liant One Day In The Life Of Jason Dean. All three books are rich­ly writ­ten. Full of light and shade. Also, check out Mar­tin Stan­ley, Robert Cow­an, Tom Leins, Aidan Thorn, LA Sykes, Julie Mor­ri­g­an. There are plen­ty of oth­ers too!

Where would you place your own work in the Brit Grit spec­trum? Who do you look up to?

I’m the light relief. The court jester. A tad bit­ter­sweet, maybe, but I write to enter­tain. The Brit Grit writ­ers I’ve took most from are prob­a­bly Char­lie Williams and Tony Black’s Gus Dury books.

What books are you most look­ing for­ward to in 2018?

I’m just keep­ing a beady, bleary eye out but any­thing by the above writers.