Free Gun by Ray Banks

 
    Introduction
     
    I was talking to another crime writer not so long ago and Ray Banks’ name came up.  This other writer gave me a funny look. "Ray Banks?" he said. "You know him, don’t you?" I replied that I did. "Yeah," this other writer said. "I think I’m a bit scared of him . . ." 
    This other writer was talking about Ray the man. Never short of an opinion (always strongly expressed, often the opposite of everyone else’s, but usually correct), an insult or a brilliantly constructed joke. (My favourite Ray Banks one liner was a throw away tweet he made once: I will miss the X Factor. In the way that Christopher Lee and pals miss the constant satanic attacks orchestrated by Charles Gray.) Clever, funny, acerbic, precise. His writing to a t.
    Most writers don’t bother with short stories now. They’re a dying art, they say. They don’t pay. They take up so much time that you could be using on a novel. ( Which does pay – but usually not very much. ) Or this one: You’re either a novelist or short story writer. Not both. Well, Ray Banks puts the lie to that theory. He’s the author of five brilliant novels (including the excellent Cal Innes quartet), several novellas (including the excellent Gun , of course) and numerous short stories. And, I have to admit – begrudgingly, because I’m useless at short stories and not too good at novellas, either – that he’s brilliant at all of them.  
    What makes them so good? A strong sense of terrain, both physical and emotional, evoked with the most precise of words. The dialogue. It just leaps off the page straight into the reader’s head. And the characters. Jesus, the characters. They’re at the bottom of the food chain, barely clinging on. The ignored, damaged dregs of a society whose collective eyes are somewhere else. Probably on the X Factor. They’re desperate enough to try anything that’ll leap frog them, short cut their way a couple of Darwinian steps higher. They’ve got their stories, they’ve got their journeys to take. And they use anything to hand. Guns. Knives. Machetes and hammers. Cunning. And above all, a burning anger and a loathing of themselves and their situation. Of course, we know that’s just not going to happen. They’re not going to get anywhere. Because somewhere along the line they get let down. More often than not it’s the very thing that’s stuck them at the bottom to begin with that sends them tumbling back down again.
    But if that wasn’t enough, he does something else. He takes those bottom-feeding characters, the kind of people you’d probably cross the road to avoid in real life, and makes the reader root for them. More than that, empathise with them. It’s a rare gift. 
    And then there’s the title novella, Gun . I have to confess, I’ve got a bit of history with this. Before I became a writer I was an actor. Oh, not a famous one, just a jobbing one. I hardly do any of that now but I still do audiobooks . And I had the pleasure of reading Gun . And what a pleasure. Those characters, that dialogue ... Usually, when I do an audiobook , I’ve got plenty to say about it. And the producer has too. But not this time.   I had the time of my life in that studio, working with those words to life. I just hope I did it justice.
    So yeah. This is Ray Banks. For my money one of the top crime writers currently operating in Britain. But scary? No. Not in that way. But scary talented? Hell yes. If you’re another British crime writer, you should be very scared indeed ...
     
    -- Martyn Waites , May 2011

 
     
     
     
    GUN
    a novella

 
     
    1
     
    Course, when he thought back on it, it was all Goose's fault. He was the one gave him the job in the first place.
    "You want to know what a real war is, you have to go right back to the last big one, the last World War. There, right, you was looking at total annihilation of a democratic way of life. Fuck the rest of them." Goose started counting on his fingers. "Korea?