Sirens - Joseph Knox

At last – Manc noir! Deep black crime set in good old Manchester. When all is said and done, whyever not? Manchester has been derelict, the great British industrial wasteland, for over fifty years to my knowledge. When I taught there in 1980-1 the kids were battling racist cops led by a fascist religious maniac in the streets of Moss Side. They broke into the cop shop and stole the Special Branch murder kit the Met had hidden there.

Wait a minute … I’m talking myself into this, aren’t I?

To an extent, Joseph Knox has beaten me to it. Only to an extent. I don’t think he’s old enough to remember the good old days when every copper with aspirations was hopelessly corrupt, certainly in my Northern experience of the time. It is of course a matter of fact with the Met. Pretty much permanently. But I believe the war on the miners and the Hillsborough disaster were what separated proper cops from the scum. Cops are much better now.

But not according to Knox in Sirens. His cop, Aidan Waits, is suspended for corruption (stealing drugs from the station) and trying to save his career by doing a deep undercover job for his Superintendent. His investigation is complicated when a local MP enlists him to find his seventeen year-old daughter. Both jobs mean getting inside the Franchise, the main drug operation of the moment. This Waits does easily. He finds the girl – but then she is murdered. If Waits can’t find who did it, he’s going to get fitted up. Suddenly all the good guys are out to kill him while all the bad guys and gals want to help. In the manner of top quality noir, things become very grey. He sorts it, of course, because he was always intended to be a series lead. The solution is complicated but satisfactory – perhaps one linkage too many.

The main problem, though – and it is by no means a fatal problem – is that neither Knox nor his editor know when to end. It’s a series, guys – we can catch up with folks next time round. Far better, in a noir, to leave a few threads loose.

Blood Brothers - Ernst Haffner

Blood Brothers was published in Germany in 1932 and suppressed the next year. It was rediscovered and republished in Germany in 2013. That's it - all we know. It's a lot more than we know about Haffner, whom we are told was a journalist and social worker. Blood Brothers is his only novel, his only book. He disappeared sometime between 1932 and 1945. There is not even a photograph of him.


What a legacy this is. It's always difficult with translations to know how accurately they reflect the original text. But Michael Hofmann is the virtuoso of translators from the German. So we can be confident that his translation is accurate and faithful. Therefore Haffner himself wrote in these breathless, staccato sentences, some of them not even complete sentences. Simplistic as they may seem, the sentences are loaded with meaning. They go off like firecrackers.


What we have is a novel of lost boys, boys in their teens who have run away from boys' homes and subsist by crime on the dark streets of Berlin. They are a gang, they share a situation, yet each is sharply defined and differentiated. We have the charismatic leader, Jonny. You can always count on Jonny. We have Fred, more flamboyant, who is the gang treasurer. And then there's Ludwig, picked up for another man's crime, who is taken back into care, only to escape again with Willi, who - paradoxically - helps him go straight in the refurbished boot business. The gang breaks up, inevitably, as the lads move on or are gaoled. It doesn't matter. They know this was always going to be a sunny interlude amid a gathering storm. Berlin can manage without them because there will always be others. There is only one Berlin. Berlin is the star, the protagonist of the superb Blood Brothers.