Free Eoin Miller 01 - Faithless Street by Jay Stringer

Forewarned

 
    I have sat down to write this
introduction several times. If I spend any more time on it, the introduction
will have taken longer to prepare than most of the stories that follow it. Most
attempts have started with the line, “If you can’t write crime fiction set in
the Midlands, then you can’t write crime fiction,”
    Quite a bold leading statement, no?
Let’s for the moment forget that I’m stealing it, and that it was something
Reed Farrel Coleman said about Brooklyn.   Reed has written seven fine Moe Prager mysteries that make his case for
him, but I hold it as true about the region I come from.   As I write this I’m researching a third
crime novel and seeing that unemployment in the United Kingdom has hit 3
million. The same data is showing me the top five areas for unemployment, and
three of them are in the Midlands.
    Sadly we are a people used to this
kind of thing. When the global economy nosedived it felt like the rest of the
world was playing catch up with us. A region built on coalmines, factories,
mills and refineries. A population roughly the same size as Scotland left
behind by Thatcher, politics, the media and the economy. Our problems read like
a greatest hits package of crime fiction; Poverty, unemployment, racial
tension, immigration, corruption, drugs, gangs.
    But I’m not here to preach at you,
and I’m sure you’re not here to feel lectured. All of these issues bubble away
at the back of my brain, and researching them informs the stories that I write,
but they’re still meant to be entertainment above all else. I like to say that
I write Social Pulp Fiction, which
really means that the story stands or falls by that last word.
    This collection gives you a peek into
several of the lives that go into the novel Old
Gold. Some of them are based on real people, some of them may be pointing
towards issues that I want to talk about, but they’re all fiction and they’re
all meant to draw you into that drama.
    A Bullet For Bauser gives us a teenage boy struggling for his identity. First Steps shows a young woman at a
crossroads between the life she expected to have and the one that’s before her. Father’s Day is the clearest
preparation for Old Gold , featuring
the same protagonist and main voice as the novel. The Lost Profits is a bit of fun, a piece of flash fiction that
grew a little to large for its form. The events of this last story lead
straight into the opening of the novel, and there’s another Easter egg buried
away in there for those who spot it.
    There are two ways you can read this
collection. Well, there are any number of ways you can read it, I suppose,
including standing on your head or under water. Whichever way you choose, just
make sure you remember to breathe. What I meant to say is that there are two suggested running orders . The first is
the one on the contents page. Arranged in that order, the collection is loosely
chronological and builds towards Old Gold in a way that will make sense as you read the book. You’ll be heading into it
with a background on many of the characters and an awareness of many of the
events that have formed them.
    The second way is more patient. There
are certain points in the novel when you could pause and read a story, almost
like a flashback scene on a directors cut DVD. This takes a little more work
than the straight-up chronological reading, but I think it adds an interesting
dimension to reading the novel For those who are tempted to try this approach,
I’m presenting the alternative running order, along with the point in Old Gold when you could read it.

 
    The Lost
Profits- Read this right before you start
OLD GOLD
      A Bullet For Bauser- Read this when you finish Chapter Five
    First Steps- Read this when you finish Chapter Thirteen
    Father’s Day- Read This When you finish Chapter Twenty
Seven

 
 
 
    It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over
until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years