Wrong Crowd

By Richard Godwin

A sultry novel in which an art thief finds himself out of his depth in a criminal maelstrom when he meets a beautiful woman with no past.

When Claude meets Maxine in the Caribbean he falls for her. He does not expect he will start an affair with her back in London, then again he does not expect to have to call on the help of his old mate Spike, nor that will they become embroiled with Russian gangsters Vladimir and Grigory.

But then Claude will do anything to hold onto Maxine.

Peopled with thieves, hustlers, gangsters, gun runners and pimps, WRONG CROWD is a slick and action-packed ride into London's low-life. East End villains and the Russian Mafia collide in a fast-paced novel of deceit and criminal obsession that sparkles as it speeds towards its astonishing conclusion.

Praise for WRONG CROWD ...

"WRONG CROWD by Richard Godwin is a tense slice of international noir that oozes atmosphere." — Paul D Brazill, author of Guns of Brixton and A Case of Noir

"An extended meditation on sexual obsession, deception, and violence." — T. Jefferson Parker, author of Full Measure and The Famous and the Dead

"If you get into The WRONG CROWD then you're into the 'right book.' Richard Godwin is an author's author who never fails to deliver a cracking read, and this one is no exception." — Matt Hilton, author of the best-selling Joe Hunter thriller series

"When you pick up a Richard Godwin book, you can be sure you're holding the work of one of the most daring and distinctive crime writers working today. He's also one of the most versatile ... Godwin can also always be relied upon to introduce a single moment of violence that permanently sears itself into the mind, and WRONG CROWD is no different ... Careful you don't miss it — tonally this is a Fulham Wolf of Wall Street, exposing the emptiness at the heart of excess. Another gem from Godwin" — Mike Stafford, nudgemenow.com

"Once more Richard Godwin proves he is the only worthy successor to Patricia Highsmith. WRONG CROWD is a deliciously tantalizing bit of dark psychological thriller that will make you think twice about whom you make friends with while on vacation. You won't want to put this one down for a second." — Vincent Zandri, NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of Everything Burns and Moonlight Weeps

"Richard Godwin does it again! With the adroit skill of a seasoned writer that knows that human decency is just a fragile scab on a wound that harbors a violent world seething in sex, drugs, lust and death, Godwin introduces us to the WRONG CROWD." — Lou Boxer, Founder of NoirCon

"Only Godwin. It's a phrase you'll use often when you get acquainted with the sensual and sultry atmosphere of this master storyteller. WRONG CROWD is some of his most accessible work, but it's one of his most textured and refined as well. Only Godwin can pull it off every time like that." — Benoît Lelièvre, DeadEndFollies.com

"Claude meets Maxine knee-deep in the Caribbean and knows he'd do anything to make her his: anything. But keeping her means raising the stakes: cash, guns, gangsters and a return to his bad old habits. Will there be enough of him left to keep her by the time he's through? Godwin makes The WRONG CROWD lethally sexy — which makes this story just right." — K.A. Laity, author of White Rabbit

"Don Juan meets the Marquis de Sade meets Kafka meets Jim Thompson meets Richard Godwin who gets them all together in one room and they collaborate on WRONG CROWD. It's a brilliant success." — Les Edgerton, author of The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, The Bitch, The Rapist and others

"Richard Godwin knows how his characters dress, that they drink and what they drive. He knows how they live — and how they die. Here's hoping no one recognized themselves in Godwin's cold canvas. Combines the fun of a good story with the joy of witty, vivid writing." — Heywood Gould, author of The Serial Killer's Daughter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Sep 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370496594

Book preview

Wrong Crowd

Introduction

One of the plays of the 1920s that held everyone’s attention was Arthur Schnitzler’s Hands Around. A drama of an interlocking chain of lovers and their needs, it held attention (including the censors) in a tight grip. Wrong Crowd, a novel mostly told in dialogue, focusses also on objects of desire, a combo of sex and money, and secondarily tropical beaches, high tech weapons, luxury mansions, high-end haberdashery, food and wine—although some key characters, as in Schnitzler’s play, are from the underclass. The sex and money, it seems, must be a result of blood, mutilation, and the fantasy of more to come. The story is told with a clear, cold assurance. It’s a very human document.

With its impassive violence and exorbitant sexual conduct, Richard Godwin’s work makes some readers uncomfortable. It does so in the same sense that Greek and Biblical Prophets made their own people uncomfortable. Prophets seem to be on the edge of madness. Cassandra foresaw the endgame of the Trojan War, but her curse was that no one would believe her. Elijah revealed Ahab’s hubris (his worship of Baal). He hears a still small voice more precious than other manifestations of God. Jesus appears before fleeing Paul, telling his apostle he has doomed him to another crucifixion. I am not comparing the novelist Godwin to a holy man. The comparison has to do with the momentousness of the subject matter, and the instincts a reader has to overcome to cope with it.

Mr Glamour is prophetic in the same way Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles is. Houellebecq envisions the replacement of the 21st century human being with a post-human creature, living without pain or fear, and without any semblance of a struggle for loving connection. A forerunner of this post-human is Mr Glamour himself. He, and his extremely wealthy victims, are almost equally without affect, just as many of Houellebecq’s characters are. One clue to what Mr Glamour, the character, acts as he does is hidden in a reference to the Book of Isaiah. The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it (Isaiah 3:9). Mr Glamour has this kind of knowledge and pursues it. He is suave and savvy with his victims, just as his victims are in their interactions. Godwin lets you know all about them, but makes you see for yourself, behind the polished surface of his prose, what awaits us in a post-human world.

Prophets of old were passionate. Contemporary prophetic novelists need to hide that emotion, for the charismatic is out of style when the eyes and weapons of the state are everywhere (see his recent Paranoia and the Destiny Programme), and when media wag the dog, replacing flesh and blood contact with truthiness. Narrators are cold as ice as they describe murders, betrayals, and rapes. In the background, one can hear Burroughs’ moving finger spelling out, Wouldn’t you? Prophets disdain the hatred of those who feel insulted. Godwin has a similar perspective.

He describes mad but thoroughly rational individuals who exercise an iron will, working in an empty universe. Their eerie brotherhood would suit an investment banker, or a Big Oil executive extracting gas and oil from shale. Perhaps that is why corporate suites, and exotic vacations, food, and fashion, are part of the setting. When human depredation reaches a point where the evil is clear, and also completely ignored, we have need of a Jeremiah. Removing the scales from the eyes must be a harsh experience. One must be crazy to try it. But it is a point, as Kafka said, that must be reached.

The mixture of popular genres existing beyond Godwin’s deadpan mystery, horror, espionage, exotic adventure, erotica, and satire is one of the keys to his success. How strongly does noir mystery embrace dire warning? Just the last lines of novels by Highsmith, Thompson, Derek Raymond, and Georges Simenon are examples. The last line of Godwin’s Paranoia and the Destiny Programme is an example, and a kind of prophecy: Beside myself I dwell, a broken shard on which you may see the fractured prism of liberty. The line is spoken not only to us, but to his own family, who cannot choose but hear.

Noir, after all, comes from the pulp stories targeted for a limited, working class audience. Their vitality could not be confined, despite or even because of their indecency, in which sex could be voyeurism and the violence reached Grand Guignol-like excess. The contempt for the rules of the game lay beyond the gunplay, fights, femme fatale, and it resonated. Richard’s vision is laser-like consistent in varied narratives such as Noir City, Meaningful Conversations, and Confessions of Hit Man, thrillers with various settings, narrators, and plots. There are various media, print and electronic, in which it could be embedded (in the opposite way in which militaries embed journalists covering today’s battlefields).

As I read One Lost Summer, I did not realize that it was a kind of horror noir. What is spooky is that Rex, the protagonist, can do what he does with his talent. He makes money and gets respect by making films about yearning. He buys drugs, indicating that he is not satisfied by his films—an artist’s ego drives him always to want more. What could be more perverse than Rex’s use of three women as mechanical captives, through the ritual magic of film? He looks into their eyes and sees his own reflection. And the horror is compounded by the fact that Rex’s voyeurism, and the damage it does to himself, his wife, his daughter Coral, is so common. Almost everything is mediated through images controlled by sponsors: corporations, politicians, and reporters. Rex, a successful independent film maker, seems to have the ability to create his own world.

So does any reader of a fiction, and especially a noir one. A 21st century writer, like a prophet of old, can facilitate that point that must be reached. Richard Godwin does.

—Jay A. Gertzman, author

Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

(University Press of Florida, 2013)

Back to TOC

WRONG CROWD

1.

Claude was knee-deep in the blue water of the Caribbean Sea when he first saw Maxine. Drops of sea water were running off her brown shoulders and she seemed to stop time with an appeal that was infinite. That day beneath an intense indigo sky he made eye contact with her as she got out of the water and walked over to the bar. He would later look back on it as a defining moment, one of those rare events in a person’s life when they are offered something they’ve secretly desired but never believed they’re capable of having. There were few things in life that Claude really wanted, but she was one of them. And he knew it instantly. He often wondered, after it all happened, if he hadn’t been drunk on pina coladas, whether he would have made the first move and she would have vanished from his life like so many chances he’d let slip.

As it was, he stood up, walked over to her and, holding up his glass, said, ‘Can I get you one?’

Maxine didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just held him in her steady gaze that gave nothing away, and Claude begin to shrink inside his own skin, about to walk away.

‘Sure,’ she said, a sparkle in her deep brown eyes.

She was looking at him over the rims of her shades, and Claude found it sexy, the way she was taking him in.

He came back from the bar with two chilled coladas which they sat sipping beneath a parasol that advertised boating trips. And he felt someone had pierced his heart with a small fish hook.

He looked at her, at her inviting skin, the curve of her body in her swim suit, and said, ‘Are you here alone?’

‘My friend went into town.’

He nodded.

‘Friend.’

That night he took her out.

Her friend, Doris, was an overweight blonde who laughed nervously when she spoke. Claude met her briefly, maybe for two minutes at the Montehabana hotel where Maxine was staying. Doris offered Claude her cheek and he smelt vodka on her breath. They left her nursing a hangover and went out to eat at Dune’s.

‘I heard this is the most cutting edge place to eat round here,’ Claude said, watching Maxine raise a forkful of swordfish to her moist mouth.

‘This is good, oh, yeah,’ she said.

He liked the way she lingered over her words, speaking them slowly, as if she was tasting them. He liked the look of her manicured nails on the starched white tablecloth. He liked her perfume, and her Gucci shades, her sensuous hands, and the way her hair touched her shoulders. She seemed immersed in an endless sensual experience he wanted to be part of, as inviting as the blue water outside the restaurant window. He didn’t ask her if she had a man, he didn’t want the dream to end. They had lime sorbet and cognacs and they sat beneath a sky strewn with stars that Claude felt were placed there especially for them.

‘Are you from London?’ he said.

‘I am.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Hammersmith. And you?’

‘Fulham.’

‘Just up the road.’

‘It feels so far away.’

‘Out here, yes.’

They stood by the sea drinking in the salt air, and he was high on the illusion of night. She looked immaculate in an off the shoulder dress, all white, figure hugging, and she made him feel important and wealthy. She was the kind of brunette he used to crave in his marriage, dark hair that shone, dark eyes, a full mouth and figure.

The mood was broken momentarily when she said, ‘What do you do?’

He looked away, towards the blurred shore around the bay. A yacht was making its way over the smooth blue water, and music floated through the dark air. It could have been in the middle of the ocean. The horizon of the land was fading in the night.

‘I sell boats.’

She took his arm and they walked along the edge of the water. When he kissed her she smelled of peaches and honey.

Claude wanted her, he wanted her like he’d wanted nothing in his life.

‘Do you think Doris will mind if you don’t go back tonight?’

‘She’s probably taken a sleeping pill. Where are you staying?’

‘The Raquel Boutique.’

And for one night in the tropical heat Claude forgot who he was. Back at his hotel room, with iced wine on the side, he peeled away Maxine’s skin tight dress and ran his hand down her arm to her waist.

‘You look like a model.’

She wrapped her long arms around his shoulders and stepped out of her stilettos.

‘You like me, Claude?’

‘I do, baby, oh I do.’

‘You like high maintenance women?’

He didn’t listen to the question because he didn’t care anymore after she touched him. She stepped out of the dress and stood there with nothing on.

‘You see I came prepared,’ she said.

‘You sure did, what a body.’

She was the greatest high he’d ever known. They slept in his bed as the fevered percussion of crickets filled the erotic night with their incessant rhythm.

2.

But when he awoke the next morning he was himself again.

Claude stood in front of the mirror in the hotel he could no longer afford, and turned away. He looked at his heels on the floor next to Maxine’s and saw they were almost as long. He looked at his face, and told himself he wasn’t bad-looking. With his blue eyes and smile he could charm women, but it was his height that always got in the way for him, and in the past he overcompensated by acting tough. He’d dropped that a while back.

He measured himself against the clean bathroom tiles, pushing out his chest and standing tall, telling himself he was nothing more than a short-arsed loser whose wife left him. He’d got home to a note that read, ‘Had enough.’ Yvonne had left her keys and wedding ring on the table in the hall. He’d pawned it for beer, which he proceeded to drink over the following week while he ignored all the reasons his marriage had failed. And he knew that he’d always wanted more than what Yvonne offered him. He didn’t feel guilty, just acutely aware of the passage of time. He became afraid that one day he’d wake up too old to dream. And so he booked the holiday in Cuba, thinking maybe he’d never return.

Now he stood there in the bathroom thinking how he hated his name. His mother had been a French model whose love of romance had unsettled the working class family he’d been born into. She talked of bohemian artists and lovers, of seductions in exotic settings, wearing revealing clothes that confused Claude and his brother. His father retreated into angry silences and alcohol. It was his mother who had named him. Claude later discovered she had a lover years ago called Claude. When she took her own life his father followed soon after, a morose man Claude watched shrink into liver cancer and amnesia. He’d often wondered if he felt betrayed by his mother’s deeds. But he could never determine if his name was a compliment or a test.

He peered out of the bathroom at Maxine. She was sleeping on her stomach, the sheets thrown back. The sight of her naked back and buttocks took his breath away. He wondered if she would put in a bill for the pleasure she’d given him, send him home with a memory and a dose of embarrassment, the experience locked inside him like a dirty secret he couldn’t share with friends. He’d had hookers before, but none like her, she didn’t act like one. He considered paying for the room and leaving when Maxine awoke. And he reprimanded himself for his inherent cynicism. But when he went into the room she reached out a hand and pulled him back into bed and he thought of more lies, hearing the sound of calypso music outside, wondering what it cost to set up a company that sold boats.

‘I can look after you,’ he whispered in her ear as she wrapped her thighs round him.

He traced her body into his mind and told himself she wouldn’t fade. He watched her shut her eyes and he said, ‘I’m done with memories and snapshots.’

They slept late that morning and Claude dreamt he was riding a surfboard on an endless wave. When he awoke he looked out of the window at the sea and the horizon as Maxine showered. He could see her through the open bathroom door. She had the kind of body that belonged in the realm of fantasy, with her full breasts, and endless curves. And he wondered how her body would look in his house. She loved the hotel. She made Claude feel rich.

She went to see how Doris was and met him for lunch at Rio Mar down by the beach.

She wore a blue sarong and drank a mojito while Claude read the list of cocktails.

‘There’s one here that’s called a panty dropper,’ he said.

It was as she laughed that he decided what he was going to do. He looked at her perfect white teeth and listened to the soft hiss of waves. They reminded him of the way Maxine sighed when he made love to her. They ate surf ’n turf. Claude watched her throat flex and relax as she swallowed.

‘I have to go back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’d like to continue this when you return.’