Prolific author Robert V Adams is a frequent visitor to the Costa del Sol. His latest work of fiction "The Really Dreadful Crime Company" is riding high on Amazon and plans are afoot to turn it into a screenplay next year. Here is an extract: *** Joe Sleight’s men slunk through the streets of the city centre towards his club, El
Paradiso. It was one of those balmy evenings. Away from the 1960s
post-blitz rebuilt rectangular modernity of the new town’s shopping streets and arcades, the streets of Kingston-upon-Hull’s elegant and old town were slightly less littered with the discarded sweet wrappers, cigarette packets, chip cartons and empty cans of a hundred thousand people. The crowds thinned. An elderly woman in the dress of an East European peasant stood forlornly clutching a bundle of The Big Issue, with a sign at her feet crudely printed with the message ‘Family of 8 to feed’. A skein of tourists ploughed their way from the yacht marina down cobbled lanes towards their coaches. Young lads skidded at scary speeds between pedestrians too surprised to move. A late busker was trying his luck at the foot of the statue of Andrew Marvell, in the elegant but near deserted Trinity Square. He tried some Bob Dylan songs which might have not gone amiss with that particular metaphysical poet of the seventeenth century had they been accompanied on a better tuned guitar. The light drained away as the sun set. The half empty streets received a new less innocent, more threatening, influx. After a certain hour the city was the barely disputed territory of assorted clubbers, coshers, crashers, cowpokes, escapers, felons and fit lads, groups and gangs of football supporters, chavs, hooligans, lads looking for girls, lads looking for other lads, ladettes looking for lads, lads looking for trouble, homeless vagabonds and travelling people, moshers, prowlers, pedal cyclists and pedants, pickpockets and criminals, recidivists, rifflers, rednecks and riflemen, scrubbers, scrappers, slappers and skateboarders, young men about town and young men and women half drunk and half dressed out for a very good time. It was as though the gutters of Hull ran with the combined excretions, concretions, ablutions, effervences, sluicing, squirting, vomiting and eruptions of drinkers, drunks, drug pushers, drug takers, dossers, degenerates, do-nothings, diners-out and assorted ne-erdo-wells. Faced with this city of contrasts between old and new, respectable and rough, the city council and the police tended to decide to keep a watching brief which, as far as many of the people of Hull were concerned, meant doing very little or even absolutely nothing at all.
Short stories Spain by the U3A Marbella Writers Group