I read Night and the City this month and wanted to say it is
well worth it. Thanks to those of you who have been plugging
it over the years.
Written in 1938, it tells the story of small-time London
crook, big-time pretender Harry Fabian, who claims to be an
American songwriter while it's not even certain if he's ever
even been to the States. People call him a pimp; he doesn't
do anything to help Zo렦ind customers, but merely takes the
bulk of her earnings. He wants to make big money and decides
that promoting wrestling is the way to do it. The problem is
that he needs to raise a stake that his partner will match.
Part of the story is how he and his partner each go about
rustling up a hundred pounds in a week.
Two of the other main characters are a struggling young
sculptor and an unemployed secretary who work in a
"bottle-club" for commissions and tips. To begin with, both
are idealistic about what they will and won't do for money
and where they want to go in life. By the end, of course,
things have changed.
There is lots of criminal activity of a fairly petty nature
and physical action in the wrestling ring. The descriptions
of people and places are fabulous, the language rings
true.
My edition was published by ibooks. It includes a glossary of
slang with eighteen kind of random entries (FANNY: Short for
'Sweet Fanny Adams,' which means 'A lot of baloney'), a brief
note on Cockney rhyming slang ("Rhyming slang isn't criminal
slang. It is used mostly by fruit salesmen, and then it
sounds like a remote African dialect, uttered with
innumerable glottal stops, at high speed; and clipped, at
that.") and an anlysis by Paul Duncan called Gerald Kersh: A
Many of Many Skins. Intriguingly, it says, "an article [he
wrote] in Esquire caused questions to be asked in the
Canadian parliament and he never wrote for Esquire
again."
Karin
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