Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

I really cannot impress upon you too strongly the importance of format. A correct format, that is. A prize-winning, best-selling format. Correct format has seen me through thick and thin and no matter what kind of inexplicable conundrums I might find myself faced with, I will always stick to format and I will always succeed in the end.

And for any of you out there who might have forgotten the format, or possibly speed-read through that paragraph because you were anxious to get to the end of that particular chapter, probably in the hope of some really hot trench-coat action coming up in the next, I will run through the format just the once more and ask that you commit it to memory because it will prove so very important when the time comes.

So, just the once more and no more.

As a nineteen-fifties genre detective I work only the four locations:

1. An office where a client comes to call.

2. A bar where I talk the all-important toot with the barman and meet the dame who will do me wrong, who will impart important information, but will do me wrong. And strike me on the head to send me down into that black whirling pit of oblivion.

3. An alleyway where I will get into sticky situations (this is where there will be a lot of trench-coat action).

4. And a rooftop, preferably during a thunderstorm, where I will encounter the villain for that final rooftop confrontation. And from which the villain will take that final big tumble to ultimate oblivion.

And that is it. That is how it works. How it has always worked and how it will always work. You can call it a tradition, or an old charter, or something, if you wish. But I just call it a perfect winning format.

But why, you might ask, am I telling you this now? Where does me telling you this fit into the format? When would I have time to tell you this? Take my steel-trap mind off the case in hand at the present and tell you all this? When, Laz, when? I hear you ask, and the answer is oh so simple.

Right now is that oh-so-simple answer. Now, when I am unconscious, spinning around and around and around in that whirling black pit of oblivion. And I will have to part company with you now, because I think I’m coming round.

Wap! went a mug-load of beer to my mug and someone shook my trench-coat lapels all around.

‘Oh, whoa, hold hard there,’ cried I, striking away this douser of my person, unhanding their hands from my spotless lapels and making a very fierce face.

‘Sorry, Mr Woodbine,’ said the kid who was my client, ‘but Mama Cass lamped you one on the noggin.’

‘That’s no excuse to besmirch me with beer.’ I was on my feet now and wiping beer froth from my chops. And also from the shoulders of my trench coat. And that was not a good thing to be happening. Beer besmirchment of the trench coat. That was a big no-no.

In my profession, which can be likened to life in general, appearance, smartness and suavity, elegance, too, and panache – and style, of course, let’s not forget style, and cleanliness, but then cleanliness is a given – all these things make us us. Raise Man above the brute beast. Make us what we are.

Why, in my line of malarkey, having a clean trench coat can mean the difference between cutting a dash at a dandy’s conservatoire and cutting the cheese in the shed. If you know what I mean and I’m sure that you do. By golly, yes siree.

The kid who was my client was dispatched, at my behest, back to the bar to fetch napkins in order to facilitate trench-coat refurbishment. I did dustings down of myself and perused my situation.

I was in an alleyway. The one to the rear of Fangio’s Bar. But it could have been any alleyway. That Brit playwright Wayne Shakespeare once wrote that ‘all the world is an alleyway and every man and every woman, a private eye’. And he wasn’t talking slash-sleeved turkey for once. And so I perused my situation, fingering the bulge of my trusty Smith & Wesson as I did so, because in my game an alleyway can spell trouble. And one must always remain alert.

But enough of this gay badinage.

I dipped my hand into my trench coat, drew out the trusty Smith & Wesson, turned upon my toes, adopted the position and let off two rounds straight and true. Two bullets spent and two men hit the dust.

One had been crouching upon one of those cast-iron fire escapes with the retractable bottom sections; the other, half-hidden behind a trashcan. Both had sniper rifles and both of these had been trained on me.

Moving with more stealth than a Vatican pimp and more élan than a Lotus, I made my way to the guy who now adorned a trashcan, turned him over with the polished toe of my classic Oxford brogue, taking great care to avoid any trouser cuff/blood contamination, and viewed my erstwhile assassin.

‘God dammit,’ I said, in a manner that would soon find favour with the villains of dubbed kung fu movies. ‘I’ve plugged me a dame.’ And although dames do do me wrong, I always feel a little pang of something whenever I have to torture vital information from one, or gun one down in an alleyway.

‘Ah! But hey.’ And I perused a wig piece. Not a dame at all, but a guy done up as one. A Jimbo. I went through the cross-dressing SOB’s pockets to check for any ID.

And at that moment the kid who was my client came out of the rear door of Fangio’s and all but hurled when he saw the blood and the body.

‘Oh my God,’ he wailed. ‘You’ve shot a woman. Oh my God.’

‘Be grateful, kid,’ I told him. ‘I spied them out as soon as I came to consciousness again. I sent you to get tissues to keep you out of the crossfire.’

‘Really?’

‘Certainly did. And to get these beer stains off my trench coat. And this ain’t no woman – it’s a Jimbo.’

The kid was looking paler than Typhoid Mary’s Triumph Herald, which was a whiter shade of green.

‘A Jimbo?’ he said. ‘One of them?’

‘Could be, kid.’ I emptied the last of the cadaver’s pockets. ‘No ID. And the body’s as cold as an Eskimo’s love bite on the Feast of Saint Stephen. Ah now, what is this?’ And I drew into the alleyway’s light what looked to be a cardboard skull. ‘What do you make of that?’ I asked the kid.

The kid shrugged and said he didn’t know.

‘Top-class shrugging,’ I said, because praise never costs and kindness comes even cheaper. ‘This is a membership card to a very exclusive club. And if there isn’t another of these membership cards in the pocket of the other dead boy up there-’ and I gestured with aplomb towards the cast-iron fire escape ‘-then I’ll be a Crowleyian cowboy at a Rosicrucian rodeo. Which I ain’t.’

‘Another body?’ went the kid.

‘Do try to keep up,’ I told him. ‘This is a turning point in the case.’

‘How so?’

I displayed the card. ‘The membership card of a most exclusive club. Perhaps the most exclusive club in New York City – Papa Crossbar’s Voodoo Pushbike Scullery.’

‘Voodoo?’ said my client, the kid. With justifiable awe.

‘Voodoo,’ I affirmed. ‘And the way this case is shaping up, it could involve almost any god in the voodoo pantheon – Loco, the god of the forests; Papa Legba, benevolent guardian of the gates; Damballa Oueddo, the wisest and most powerful, whose spirit is the serpent; Maitresse Ezilee, the blessed Virgin, or Ogoun Badagris, the bloody dreadful.’

‘Mr Woodbine,’ said the kid (my client) with just a smidgen more awe, ‘you certainly know your voodoo pantheon.’

‘Kid,’ I told him, ‘in my job, knowing your voodoo pantheon can mean the difference between breaking the ice in the governor’s black carriage and breaking wind in a gargler’s back passage. And the distinction ain’t too subtle. If you know what I mean and I’m pretty damn sure that you do.’