The LONG FIRM - Hardcover

Arnott, Jake

3.87

1,730 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156947169X ISBN 13: 9781569471692

Publisher: Soho Press, 1999

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A long firm is a particular type of scam perpetrated by British gangs on unsuspecting innocents. Harry Starks is a kind of fraud, too. He likes to think of himself as an impresario in roaring-60s London, a club owner. Certainly, he is a romantic but, in truth, he is a gangster, a rival of the infamous Krays and every bit as ruthless (and gay).
He has an expensive flat in Chelsea full of scrapbooks showing him with Sonny Liston, Johnny Ray, Ruby Ryder, and other celebrities who appear at his club. Even Judy Garland. He likes to hobnob with fighters and performers and, recently, a member of parliament whose allegiance he has cultivated. Harry collects them, as if proximity will give him legitimacy.
Harry Starks is a force, a contradiction. Harry is ingenuous and evil. He is menacing and ruthless, yet compelling, a romatic who insists on honor, insists on loyalty, on his cut of the cosmic pie. His generosity is as renowned as his barbarity, and he is very generous.

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Review:

"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 in the early 1960s. Five very different characters tell their five very different stories about "Torture Gang Boss" Harry Starks, a man who likes to keep both Bertrand Russell and Physique Pictorial on his coffee table. His lover and kept boy, Terry, recalls him as a man who "liked to break people" but also a "frightened little child," while according to the Tory lord who frequented his erotic functions, Starks is "lower-class tearaway." In the eyes of his various criminal and starlet peers, Mad Harry is a depressive with a diabolical mind, one who likes to "stage manage the fear." The radical young sociologist who teaches him in prison marks him down as a product of working-class subculture, a living critique of capitalism. When, however, he asks Harry what he makes of Gay Liberation, he doesn't quite get the expected response:

"Well," he said with a gleam in his eye. "Someone once called Ronnie Kray a fat poof. Ronnie took the top of his head off with a Luger. That's my sort of Gay Liberation. Though, to be honest, I think it was the fat part what got to him. Ron's, well, touchy about his weight."

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 the corruption, of that life drive this story, but Arnott manages to weave clich� into enigma, myth into inquiry, thereby revitalizing our well-worn images of the mad, bad, and dangerous to know. As Starks would put it, keeping Brecht's question before the readers' eyes, "It's all about the economy of power." --Vicky Lebeau

About the Author:

Jake Arnott has worked as a mortuary technician, laborer, artist's model, actor, and sign-language interpreter, as well as enjoying many fruitful periods of unemployment. He lives in London, England.

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