BRAVO JUBILEE

author:
CHARLIE OWEN

Fiction
448 pages
Headline Books

The third in Charlie Owen’s series of excellent police procedurals, Bravo Jubilee is set in the seventies—Owen’s “golden age of vocational policing”—and the fictional North Manchester district of Handstead: a penurious council dumping ground for the city’s most malevolent social housing tenants. Known by the bastardised phonetic “Horse’s Arse,” the division functions as a kind of police penal colony, where officers are transferred “if they had really fucked up somewhere else.” Consequently, Handstead’s cops constitute “an extraordinary collection of misfits, alcoholics, psychopaths, sociopaths, delinquents, sexual deviants, criminal masterminds and violent renegades.” The books chart a running turf war between cops and robbers that have more in common than either side would like to think.

Relentlessly scatological, Owen’s books seem at first like nothing more than a parade of anecdotes, loosely strung together. Uniformed coppers spike their colleagues’ drinks with acid, kill time on the late turn by taking blowjobs from prostitutes, and set fire to people’s cars. The reaction in the reader is that of hysterical and horrified disbelief. Yet Owen, a retired police inspector, adds enough procedural detail to keep you convinced and turning the pages, and what feels like a chaotic mess turns into disciplined storytelling.

And Owen can be lyrical. PC Alan “Pizza” Petty, the sympathetic underdog of the series, tries to explain the feeling of an isolated nightshift: “When you walk, alone, into a dark and apparently deserted car park at three in the morning, I swear you can actually hear the place breathing. If you stand still and listen, I swear you can hear it breathe.” And despite the brutal opportunism of most of Owen’s characters, they really grow on you: they come across as good men, with a curious synthesis of honour and corruption.

If you’re new to Owen I’d advise starting with the first book and working forwards—with his readability, this will take you about a weekend. He is that rare thing, a “politically incorrect” writer with talent.

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