Smith Series

Violence has been privatised.  Smith works for a company that specialises in violent solutions. "The natural government of the world is gangsterism. The establishment is the biggest gang in town. But gangsters worry that some day they won't be frightening enough, charismatic enough, clever enough . . . to prevent a revolution." Smith isn't interested in revolution. Revenge will do. For the moment.   Stephen Smith is a translator. He is also trained to kill and hurt. Employed by a private security company owned by two brothers with a grotesque sense of humour, he goes out to the highest bidder, mainly the UK government who prefer not to use their own for any really dirty business. After a particularly gruesome event pricks his conscience Smith has a break down. The brothers disagree about what to do with him. One of them, Cornelius, wants him dead. The other, Horatio, likes the idea of keeping him alive, to annoy his brother.   After a failed attempt on his life Stephen decides to go rogue, escaping and embarking on a series of escapades that will expose the company and the people who employ them. Cornelius orders Blake, a serving policeman, disturbed and psychopathic, to track Smith down. The two outsiders, both being used by people who hold them in disdain, create bloody mayhem across a violent Britain where, if 'the establishment' is the biggest gang in town, it is also an unwieldy dinosaur, vulnerable to attack from the wildly unpredictable Smith.   Is Smith a revolutionary? An anarchist? He doesn't think so. As far as he is concerned, this is the response of reasonable people to an unequal society. And he'll keep it up as long as he's having fun.

A policeman is puzzled.   It's like the IRA all over again. The IRA and the Krays and the Angry Brigade. Why haven't they all been looking for this killer, this Stephen Smith? Why isn't the country on high alert?   He discovers why. There are 'sensitive' aspects to this case. The public mustn't be alarmed. In other words, he used to be one of ours and now he's gone off the rails, got himself the weirdest gang - a posh lawyer couple, an Irish builder, a Croatian stripper, a Cockney chancer and a crazy poet - and a serious amount of cash from a bank robbery in Switzerland, laundered and sequestered who knows where. A highly funded commando unit who are after… what? The report calls them 'anarchist'. What do anarchists want? Blow everything up? Well when they do, it's the strangest places.   Then there's the deaths: a dentist found in the waters of Cardiff Bay – shot. The bits of another one, apparently blown up. A woman, executed in a car park. A general assassinated at an English public school.   Too much mystery.   'Something stinks. There's something about this whole situation that's not right. None of it fits. You all know it. I know it. But our job is to find and catch the criminals. Nothing else is important here. We are going to get this bastard using old-fashioned police work and then we'll worry about anything unusual going on. So. I want a life story. I want to know the colour of his underpants and the smell of his farts. And I want it all by the end of the day.'   Should be easy enough, after all, Smith wants to get caught. The question is… why?

One last explosion. One last outrage.   Smith is getting too old for this business. Which business? The murder, kidnap, torture, blow up business. The rocking the world on its axis, to shake some sense into it, business.   With just enough energy for a grand finale, he will need help. Most of the old crew are dead, but his apprentice, the schoolboy assassin Toby who is now accepted into the organization run by his former employers, he's still secretly loyal. And the poet who has a world of voices in his head is still in love with the ideas Smith presents. Both, like so many who meet him are also a little bit in love with the man himself.   Then there are the happy coincidences that always seem to happen around Smith. Just at the point when he is searching for the most suitable targets for his righteous anger a dying politician and a guilty, washed up journalist send him a list that includes a raping patriarch of a criminal family. A corrupt and hateful newspaper editor. A child-murdering businessman. Smith uses them as the introduction, to the big show.   And after the ear-splitting, sky-shattering climax: the come down. The sordid back stage shenanigans. More mess for the cleaners. Only once these are over and the last dregs of chaos have been rinsed from the night will he sleep.   Until then…? Well, as Smith likes to say, keep love in your heart and a gun in your pocket.

Stephen Smith, ex-multi-lingual torturer in chief, now a conscience-stricken berserker looking for a target. Having permanently dispatched his previous employer and his brother, who between them ran two rival, private security firms engaged to handle the work too dirty for the 'official' security services, Smith is somewhat at a loss.  So he welcomes a call from journalist and brief old flame Miriam Taylor, who, despite swearing never to deal with him again suddenly finds herself in need of a man with his special set of skills and his peculiar, unique idea of chivalry. Miriam has been reporting on the assault, rape and eventual murder of a female community cop, a 'plastic plod', by Harry Kimpton, a former football hooligan turned apparently respectable businessman who is standing to be Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner of Essex.   Kimpton is keen to move his security company up to the big time and has his eye on joining Smith's ex-colleagues who view him as strictly small time and not particularly smart. But, they find, he might have his uses.   An ambitious Catholic priest is embarking on a crusade to win converts from the Anglican church in Hurston, on Kimpton's home turf. Sensing possibilities in a conflict that might spread Smith's old colleagues do their best to ratchet up the row. They tell Kimpton to stir the pot and it is into a stew of violent nuns, old skinheads and enraged women that Smith jumps, feet first, doing his best to make as much mess as possible.   Meanwhile, Miriam finds that she has developed a taste for a certain amount of lethal chaos herself as evidenced by the fact that, there she is, in a pub full of sexist old racists holding a gun, feeling strangely empowered.   And there is one more intriguing development. The two security companies have decided they need a new boss, someone who can be as brutal as the people he commands, someone who is smart enough to survive threats from some very dangerous sorts, someone who doesn't take any of it seriously and yet, somehow, is a serious contender. Someone, perhaps, like Stephen Smith. That's what they are wondering. But what does Smith think?