The Long Firm Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Long Firm Book

"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding one?" Bertolt Brecht's provocative question opens Jake Arnott's first novel The Long Firm and sets the scene for its memorable exploration of the London underworld at the beginning of the 1960s. Five very different characters tell their five very different stories about "Torture Gang Boss" Harry Starks. A man who "liked to break people" but also a "frightened little child" is how his lover and kept boy Terry recalls him; a "lower-class tearaway", according to the Tory lord who frequents his erotic parties; a depressive with a diabolical mind, one who likes to "stage manage the fear", in the eyes of his various criminal and starlet peers; a product of working-class subculture and a living critique of capitalism, concludes the radical young sociologist who teaches him in prison. Harry Starks is the beginning and end of The Long Firm, a compelling showman who embodies the brutal realism and impossible dreams at the heart of Arnott's vision of London low life. The glamour and corruption of that life drive this story but Arnott manages to weave cliche into enigma, myth into inquiry, in a way that revitalises the well-worn images of the mad and the bad. As Starks would put it, keeping Brecht's question before the readers' eyes, "It's all about the economy of power, Lenny". --Vicky LebeauRead More

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  • Amazon

    London. The Swinging Sixties. Welcome to our manor

  • Foyles

    The cult bestseller that launched Jake Arnott as one of the most exciting new voices of the decade - 'A gangster novel every bit as cool, stylish and venomous as the London in which it's set' (Independent on Sunday)'I'll tell you what happens now,' Harry says, reading my mind. 'You can go now. We're quits. You don't talk to anybody about anything. You've had a taste of what will happen if you do.'Meet Harry Starks: club owner, racketeer, porn king, sociology graduate and Judy Garland fan. To be in his orbit is to be caught up in the music, the parties, the people and the sex of London in the Swinging Sixties. But behind the rough charm and cheap glamour is a man prepared to do what it takes to get what he wants.

  • 0340748788
  • 9780340748787
  • Jake Arnott
  • 17 February 2000
  • Sceptre
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 352
  • New edition
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