Of Music and Murder

(Editor’s note: The following short piece comes from Michael G. Jacob, who with his wife, Daniela De Gregorio, has written two historical novels under the pseudonym “Michael Gregorio”: Critique of Criminal Reason [2006] and Days of Atonement [2007].)

Six o’clock.

It is Guy Fawkes Night in England, but we are in the Sala Vaccara auditorium in Perugia, Italy.

We should start, but we give it another five minutes to let the hall fill up a bit. This is Umbria Libri, the annual bookfest. There are three other events going on at the same time in town, including one with film director Emir Kusturica, so the competition is fierce.

On the stage is Barry Adamson, rock musician, soundtrack composer, and much more. I am preparing to interview him. The other half of “Michael Gregorio,” my wife, Daniela, is poised in the front seats with a camera.

By 6:10 p.m., a few more people have drifted in, but not so many as we had hoped to see.

I start off slowly, giving the laggards time to arrive, introducing Barry Adamson to a world that already knows him very well, asking questions about his early life in Manchester, his origins in punk music (which owe a great deal, he admits, to the “revelation” of the Sex Pistols), and his long association with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. We then go on to talk about his work as a soloist and composer of film soundtracks for Hollywood directors such as David Lynch, and then, more recently, and even more surprisingly, as an author.

“What inspired the story?” I ask, and Adamson tells the audience about his years of living in the Maida Hill area, in West London; the noise, the sights, the voices, the chaos. “It was music to my ears,” Adamson says.

“Maida Hell” was the result of an invitation by UK novelist Cathi Unsworth, to contribute a short story to an anthology she had started putting together. (Adamson’s full yarn can be read here.) When London Noir was published in Britain by Serpent’s Tail in 2006, however, it did not make a great splash. Apart from the tale by Barry Adamson, a newcomer to fiction writing, the volume contained 16 short stories by the great and the not-so-great, including Ken Bruen and Peter McCabe, authors who had been born in London, or who had at least lived there.

But recently, Barry Adamson made the news in Italy.

His story, “Maida Hell,” won the Best International Short Story prize at the prestigious Grinzane-Cavour Crime Festival in Aorta.

“Were you surprised to win?” I ask him.

Rather than answer, Adamson stands up and goes into the second phase of the night’s program. He gives a live reading of “Maida Hell,” complete with the soundtrack he had prepared in the studio and brought along to add atmosphere to the wild and lively prose.

Thirty minutes later, the audience breaks into warm applause as Father Donaghue, the narrator of Adamson’s award-winning story, intones his final “Amen.”

It is a dynamic tour de force, far better live than on the printed page. “Maida Hell” resonates with a rich population of accents and voices--the whores are Liverpudlian, the shopkeepers are Pakistani, the drunks are, predictably, Irish--“a community of chagrins and fighters,” as Barry Adamson describes it. The term “urban rap” would probably sum up the listener’s point of view. From the reader, however, “Maida Hell” requires the sort of concentration that few writers would dare to ask of their faithful followers. Indeed, I make favorable comparisons with Dylan Thomas and “Under Milk Wood,” saying that “Maida Hell” recalls a tougher, rougher world, with a more brutal, but equally entrancing, vocabulary.

Afterwards, in the street, I ask Adamson what he thinks of Thomas.

“Great, great. I read him when I was young. Just hope I don’t end up like that.”

“What do you mean?

“Dead drunk. Dead.”

“What do you fancy to drink?” Daniela asks us, as we sit down to relax and chat in an open-air café on a mild November evening in the main street of Perugia.

“Coca-Cola,” Barry insists.

He won’t end up pickled in alcohol, that’s for certain!

READ MORE: “Murderous Thoughts in a Beautiful Setting,” by Roger Morris (The Rap Sheet).