“Who would have thought a queasy cabal of millionaires and billionaires would fuck a country in such a dead-eyed, remorseless fashion?”
This Thursday will see the release of Hunger, a brand new charity anthology from Ipswich-based independent publisher Urban Pigs Press. The collection includes my story ‘In the Land of the Pig (The Butcher is King)’.
I’ll be sharing more details regarding the anthology later this week, but in the meantime you can check out this interview I did with Urban Pigs Press co-founder James Jenkins to promote the anthology.
If you encounter excessive blood flow, apply a compression bandage and seek urgent medical assistance.
Dennis Cafferty isn’t decrepit, but he carries with him the stench of death. His most recent facelift went badly wrong and he now has a permanently haunted expression. His left eye twitches – as far as the taut skin allows. Too much booze and too little sleep. I know that feeling.
“You have plenty of men on your payroll, Cafferty. Why me?”
He shrugs.
“Those boys would walk through the flames for me, but I need subtlety.”
“Like last time?”
He scratches at the livid patch of razor-rash on his throat.
“Yeah, like last time.”
Maybe his faculties are deserting him: last time I did a job for him I was about as subtle as a house-brick in the teeth.
“Just find the bastard who set fire to my daughter, Rey.”
I nod.
2. Wash your hands, and remove any debris from the wound with water – or risk gangrene, necrosis or amputation.
Gary Maguire is a bad man, deep in the grind. He used to work for Cafferty, until he started cutting his boss’s smack with fentanyl – and putting people in the morgue.
When he found out, Cafferty threw him out of a second-floor window.
Maguire waited a year. Picked up Cafferty’s 17-year-old daughter, Denise, at a club. Promised her the world, then took her to a dirty-arse trap-house. When Maguire was done with Denise, he splashed Hennessy on her back and tried to set fire to her.
After Maguire’s boys stomped out the burning, Denise smashed the Hennessy bottle, and jabbed it into his gut. Crawled out of the trap-house naked – left the broken bottle embedded in Maguire’s midriff.
By the time Cafferty arrived, Maguire was long gone – leaving nothing behind except porno on the flatscreen, a pool of blood on the ratty mattress and a cadaverous pair of junkie squatters.
Itchy and Scratchy didn’t know shit, but Cafferty brutalised them anyway. Dumped their smashed bones in a skip two streets away.
Sterilise the utensils you intend to use and soak the wound with a disinfectant solution. If disinfectant is unavailable, you can use high-proof alcohol.
Back-street surgeons in Paignton are usually alcoholic animal doctors or struck-off GPs. Maybe the occasional ghoulish hobbyist. Men with liver-spotted hands and rusted equipment. Unclean rooms and unclean thoughts. Marwood is no exception.
His overgrown front garden stinks of burned plastic patio chairs. There’s an old Toyota on the grass – its roof dented like it has been used as a trampoline.
Marwood is taking a sip of coffee liqueur to tame his maniac tremble when I kick the door off its hinges. He waves his scalpel at me, and I slap it out of his claw-like hand.
I drag Maguire off the viscera-splattered kitchen table by his ankles.
“Careful – his stitches won’t hold!”
Maguire groans as his ruptured flesh snags on the exposed floorboards, leaving a thick smear of ooze in the hallway.
Penetrate the sub-dermal layer of skin with your needle and sew away from yourself. The edge of the wound will be numb, and can be pierced with minimal discomfort.
We’re in an anonymous room in an abandoned office block. It’s neither up for sale, nor scheduled for demolition, so there’s no reason for anyone to disturb us.
There’s a thick fug of cigarette smoke, and a juicy body odour tang, and I suspect that Cafferty has used this place before.
Even soaked in blood and viscera, his clothing looks expensive. Black leather jacket, polo-neck jumper, smart slacks and designer plimsolls.
At his feet, Maguire’s face has already been reduced to a splintered mess of bone.
“Are you not curious to see how this plays out?” Cafferty asks me.
I glance down at the contents of his dented metal tool-box, which have been laid on a plastic sheet in order of pain management potential.
“I’ll read about it in the Herald Express – like everybody else.”
He shrugs.
“Have a nice life, Rey.”
“Life is just different ways of not dying, Cafferty.”
He grunts, and I leave without another word.
Zig-zag your way across the open wound and tie it off with a strong knot.
If you enjoyed this story you can buy my books here (UK) or here (US)!
“Sharon told me that he met her at Lymington Road coach station. Another Northern runaway heading for the English Riviera. Took her for sausage and chips at a greasy spoon in Torre and offered her a job as a glass collector in his club. When she said no, he offered her a cigarette laced with Donkey Dust and waited until she passed out.”
I have a brand new piece of flash fiction online at Shotgun Honey today: Disco Blisters.
I think it’s the ninth story I’ve had published by Shotgun Honey (starting with There’s A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends back in March 2013), but I might be wrong! After almost a decade it’s still a thrill to be featured on the site.
“It’s Christmas Eve and I’m standing in the middle of a stash house in Hookhills, bleeding from one ear and trying to work out which one of the hired hands I should shoot first: the skinny guy in the soiled Sexy Santa minidress or the fat fuck in the scuffed-looking ballistics vest.”
It’s time for the fourth part of my ’12 Crimes of Christmas’ trip down memory lane, and a visit to the Punk Noir Magazine archives. Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells was written in time for Christmas 2018 and The Naughty Listappeared in 2019.
As I’ve noted before, the Joe Rey stories can often be categorised as either rampage stories or mysteries – although the lines generally blur before each story reaches its blood-soaked conclusion! Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells is definitely a rampage story: Rey is hired to retrieve a kit-bag full of Fentanyl from a stash house, and shit inevitably goes sideways.
A reworked version of this tale (retitled as Stash House) went on to appear in my brutally enjoyable short story collection Ten Pints of Blood (or ‘ten bloody readers’, as it should probably be called!). Ten Pints of Blood also includes Spine Farm, a grisly cold case investigation that takes place at Christmas – making it my most Christmassy book yet!
I love the cold case storylines, as they are a welcome change of pace, and the stakes are generally very different. As is the case with a lot of my Christmas stories, The Naughty List is more light-hearted than my other material and examines the aftermath of a vicious Securicor van robbery that took place in 1991.
“The pub is full of aging hard men, all nursing unfinished pints and festering grudges. The motherfucker I’m looking for is sat at a corner table, wearing more makeup than a mob wife. It accentuates his rubbery, porcine features. His name is Michael Sweetwater, and he was the man the Andretti Family tasked with slashing open the stomachs of constipated drug mules.”
“I’m face down in an alleyway, Santa suit splattered with fresh excrement and stale fast-food waste. I struggle to make out the caller ID because my right eye is swollen shut. It’s Terrell.”
It’s almost time for my annual Christmas crime story, so I thought I’d go through the archives and track down the updated links for all of my old pieces as a kind of blood-soaked festive countdown!
To kick things off, I’m heading back to 2016/17 and the Flash Fiction Offensive.
My first ever FFO story, Triggerman, appeared way back in 2009, and I always enjoyed appearing on the site.
Check out Slay Ride (2016) and Slay Ride 2: Jingle Bullets (2017) which have been resurrected at the new Out of the Gutter Online Archives site.
Look out for more reheated Christmas crime stories between now and the big day!
“The elderly woman’s face explodes in a ruptured mess of cartilage and bone as my lumpen forehead makes contact with the bridge of her nose. That’s going to leave a fucking mark.”
Today I have a brand new short story online at All Due Respect: The Safe House.
I think it’s one of my best Paignton Noir stories to date, but I’m biased!
Thanks to ADR publisher Chris Rhatigan for running the story.
If you missed my 2020 ADR story, 49,000 Ways To Die, here’s the link.
“I scratch my balls and survey the prison car park, wondering which one of my dwindling pool of acquaintances is going to pick me up this time. There are men – and women – on both sides of the law who would like nothing more than to bundle me into a Transit van and bludgeon me with blunt objects before burying me in a shallow grave. I look over my shoulder. Governor Diggs is curtain-twitching in his office like a suburban voyeur. For all I know, he has his hands down his fucking pants as well. He’s definitely the kind of guy who could get physically aroused by the prospect of masked men inflicting extreme violence on me.”
Who’s ready for a new Paignton Noir e-book? Good, because Skeleton Crew is out today!
As with all of the other e-books, Skeleton Crew is a self-contained story, although it is worth reading Dirty Bullion first if you want to find out why Rey is in prison in the first place!
There are also appearances from characters we’ve met in Snuff Racket, Sin Clinic and Slug Bait, so regular readers are in for a treat!
Here’s the synopsis:
Fresh from his second stint in HMP Channings Wood, disgraced private investigator Joe Rey returns home to find out that his crumbling rooming house, the Black Regent, has been quietly acquired by Devon & Cornwall Constabulary and converted into a clandestine safe house to shelter witnesses to some of the Westcountry’s most horrific crimes. While he gathers his belongings – and enjoys one final drink in the TV lounge with decrepit elderly cops Benson and Hedges – a masked mob descend upon the building, in search of the sole occupant: a terrified woman, who is now ensconced in Rey’s former room. Fight or flight? What do you think? Welcome back to Paignton, Joe. There’s no place like home…
“I’m leaning against a badly rusted rollercoaster called the ‘Titty Twister’, staring at a guy who looks like a fucking autopsy sketch. His complexion is tombstone grey and he’s wearing a fluorescent 1980s ski jacket with one of the ragged sleeves gaffer-taped back on. He looks like he’d be more at home selling crack to addicts in a graveyard than working at a funfair.”
Today I have a brand new Halloween-themed Paignton Noir story online at Punk Noir Magazine. Why not take a ride on the Bone Train?
Thanks to Punk Noir head honcho Paul D. Brazill for running the story!
In the mood for more Halloween flash fiction? Try Flesh & Bone, which was featured at Close To The Bone on Halloween in 2015.
“The man wipes the condensation off the cracked mirror with the threadbare sleeve of his sanitarium-issue sweatshirt. It’s a bitterly cold day and he tries to massage some feeling into his hideous, rubbery face. A face that only a motherfucker could love. A visage that was clumsily stapled back together after it was disfigured with a meat axe in an abandoned factory three years ago. The staples got infected in an effluence-splattered holding cell and now form a rusted diagonal seam that bisects his warped face. He was never a good-looking man beforehand – his slack jaw and bottle-thick National Health Service glasses only serving to highlight his otherness. Now he looks fucking repulsive.”
From the Slop Shop prologue, ‘Hometown Scars’
New e-book time! First: a confession. I never intended to write Slop Shop. It definitely wasn’t on my hit-list of planned projects. I was flicking through Repetition Kills You to make a few continuity notes ahead of a separate project, and a few RKY supporting characters snagged in my consciousness. A lot of people die in that book, but these ones didn’t, and it got me wondering what they would be up to – three years on.
As for Rey, this book finds him in muscle-for-hire mode, no longer doing investigative work. An opportunity to find a meat tycoon’s daughter changes all that, and his demons come out to play. I love writing the PI stories and I love writing what I call the ‘rampage’ stories. This story combines both elements, but definitely feels more like a rampage story.
In terms of style and content (and the disjointed writing process), it resembles Skull Meat more than any other story of mine. See what you think!
Synopsis:
A wrongfully discharged mental patient with an axe to grind.
An elderly mob matriarch with a scorched earth revenge policy.
An ageing meat tycoon with a trophy wife and a missing daughter.
And a disgraced private investigator with blood on his hands.
Everyone’s a victimiser and everyone’s a victim. Dead meat is the best they can aspire to. Welcome to the SLOP SHOP.
SLOP SHOP is the nerve-shredding new thriller from the author of SKULL MEAT, SNUFF RACKET, SPINE FARM, SIN CLINIC and SLUG BAIT.
Things To Do In Devon When You're Dead... 