Gravy Train walking tour #2

And here’s the next in the series of walking (or cycling) tours taking in the locations I used in ‘Gravy Train’. This one is longer and you might well need to bike it rather than walking the whole thing, especially as you’d have to come back again!

Walk #2: Hockley to Edgbaston

Distance: approx 5 miles each way. I say approx because Google Maps had a major conniption when I tried to change the preferred route, which was for cars and didn’t take in half the places I needed it to. The wonders of technology…

Route:

1. Start at the Hockley flyover/Great Hampton Street. The area to the left as you walk towards the city centre is where I had in mind when I described Sandra and Mike’s public house, and there are examples of the type of pub (though nowhere near as rundown as theirs!) in the surrounding streets.

2. Continue along Livery Street, then turn right into Great Charles Street Queensway and follow this to Paradise Circus. This area is currently undergoing major roadworks to install a tram line and road and footpath closures seem to change on a daily basis, so find the approved route to take you across the island to Broad Street.

3. Once on Broad Street walk a short distance until you come to Gas Street, and turn left down here. There are some nice old buildings, now mostly cafes and bars, which back onto the canal basin. Find a cast-iron archway with a path that leads to the canalside towpath and have a good wander round. The area of the Gas Street Basin is fascinating and well worth exploring. I used the arch, the bridge and the towpath in the final showdown between crime boss Vernon Ball and Sandra’s “uncle” George, over the bag of money that Ball’s underling Lenny had stolen.

4. Retrace your steps to Broad Street and continue to Five Ways Island, a vast gyratory traffic system enclosing a green open space, with subways to various roads, offices and shopping centres. This island is central to the action in ‘Gravy Train’; it’s here that Sandra and Mike visit the betting shop to collect their winnings and get mugged by Lenny; and it’s on one of the roads leading to the island that Justine’s car breaks down and she nicks Lenny’s van to get herself home. Here’s a couple of pics of what might have been the betting shop, and the subway where Lenny froze his nuts off.

5. You can end your tour here, but if you’re feeling particularly energetic, take the subway up and onto Hagley Road and carry on walking for about a mile, until you come to the junction with Norfolk Road. There are a handful of clubs and casinos in this area which helped to inspire the Roller Club which Justine breaks into.

6. Retrace your steps, or catch one of the many buses that head along Hagley Road back into the city centre.

And that’s it. Once again I hope it gives you some new areas to discover and a bit of fun poking about. But again, don’t forget that Covid regulations mean we’re all expected to exercise within our local areas, so if you’re not already in Birmingham please don’t make a special trip yet.

And again, if you like the sound of the book then feel free to grab a copy here, and thank you!

Gravy Train walking tour #1

Stuck in Birmingham during lockdown and sick of pounding the same old streets? Then why not try discovering some of the locations in my books? This is one of several walking (or cycling, for the longer ones) trails that I’ll hopefully be posting on here in the next week or two, with routes, distances, and interesting things to see along the way. I hope they help to inspire you.

To start off, a nice easy stroll centred on the suburb of Moseley. This forms one of the main locations of my dark crime caper ‘Gravy Train’ and the walk includes the settings for Fred’s courtyard workshop, Vernon Ball’s criminal HQ, and the bench where grass Todd meets his police contact Suzanne.

Walk #1: Moseley to Cannon Hill Park

Distance: approx 1.5 miles (and the same back!)

Route:

1. Start in the centre of Moseley. If you’re not local and on foot, there’s parking in a small car park off the Alcester Road or in some of the surrounding streets plus a good bus service (no 50) which passes right through the ‘village’ centre. Head along Alcester Road as far as Woodbridge Road and turn down here. A short distance on the right is a gated archway leading to a courtyard of apartments. There was a dairy operating out of the courtyard at one time and it’s one of the models I based Fred’s car mechanics business on.

2. Retrace your steps, cross over Alcester Road and head down Chantry Road (opposite Woodbridge Road). This is a fascinating street full of large, late Victorian houses, many of them uniquely decorative and some so vast they have their own coach-houses. The ones on the left-hand side back onto the private Moseley Park; there’s a locked gate into the park near the bottom of the hill. It’s one of these houses that forms the lair for crime boss Vernon Ball, with its basement flat, its garden, and its view over the park and pool. I couldn’t possibly say which particular house, but here’s a general street view to give you some idea.

3. At the end of Chantry Road turn left into Park Hill, past more impressive Victorian houses, then find a safe place to cross either Salisbury Road or Edgbaston Road until you’re on the diagonally opposite corner. From here walk a short distance along Edgbaston Road to one of the main entrances to Cannon Hill Park.

4. Cannon Hill Park is a vast city park donated to the people of Birmingham by Miss Louisa Ryland and opened in 1873. It covers over 80 acres – more if you add the woodland, conservation areas and nature reserve next to it, and there are lots of different walks and paths to choose. Look out for the foundations of the old glasshouse, the boating lake, the scale model of the Elan Valley reservoirs which provide the city’s water supply – and the bench where Todd met Inspector Suzanne Charlton, and got pecked by a duck.

5. After a good mooch round the park (and a takeaway coffee from the cafe, assuming it’s open and assuming you’re allowed to) retrace your steps to Moseley.

I hope the walk inspires you to explore this historic and interesting corner of Birmingham but please bear in mind that current restrictions mean you can’t travel outside of your ‘local area’ (whatever that means) for exercise. So if you’re based outside the city, please bookmark this for another day! And if you’d like to read about the various locations of ‘Gravy Train’ in more detail, why not treat yourself to a copy of the book? You can find it here.

A funny thing happened on the way to the canal…

I just had to dash in and share this hilarious news item from (where else?) Birmingham. Looks like even the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police could have lifted his evening’s work straight from the pages of ‘Gravy Train’.

I swear this is a genuine incident and not something I’ve made up. Although given that it involves fishing bags out of canals, I might well have… Just shows those canals really are handy receptacles for all manner of junk!

Head to Fred’s

Just a quick update today, with some news I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago. This is that signed copies of both ‘Raise the Blade’ and ‘Gravy Train’ are now available to buy at Fred’s Bookshop (formerly Fred Holdsworth Books) in Ambleside. So if you’re in the Lake District over the coming weeks/months, on holiday or just visiting, you can pop in and pick up a copy to read in your hotel/guest house/tent.

The bookshop is well worth a visit anyway. It may be tiny, but it’s in a nice old building and is absolutely crammed with books. Many of these have a local connection (local authors, Cumbrian settings, walk books, cycling books, books about sheep etc etc) but there’s also a good range of more general stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, to browse. And manager Steve is both friendly and knowledgeable, and always ready to help with queries or recommendations.

 

Voodoo curse?

That story missing from my website that I mentioned yesterday? It was none other than ‘That Voodoo That You Do’, a hilariously horrible “missing scene” from ‘Gravy Train’ that I wrote a few months ago and had published in Punk Noir magazine.

It sheds a little light on the strained relationship between Vernon Ball and his chauffeur-cum-dogsbody Bradley, a guy Ball describes as “not the brightest sixpence in the collection plate”. Just why did the two of them fall out? Why did it nearly ruin Ball’s shoes? And will you ever be able to watch Blazing Saddles again?

I think the story’s title must have exerted its own voodoo curse on me, because for some reason I completely forgot to add it to the list of all my other stories on the website. That’s now fixed, and you can follow the link to read the story for yourselves. I hope you enjoy it!

Special offer on Gravy Train

So suddenly it’s the first of August. No, I can’t quite believe it either – where has the year gone?! But there is good news too. Because it means that the month-long special offer on the e-book of ‘Gravy Train’ has just kicked off.

Want to take advantage of the offer? Then hurry along to Amazon UK, where you can get the Kindle version for just £4.70 – that’s more than a quid off the normal price. And a long way off the £80,000 the book’s characters are chasing around after!

Gravy Train locations #3: Todd’s bench

It doesn’t sound like much of a location for a crime book, does it? A simple wooden bench at the local park. It’s the sort of place you lounge around on a hot day with a book and an ice-lolly, or perch for a few minutes to watch the ducks. Or use as a meeting place when you’re a grass waiting for your police handler, perhaps?

Obviously, it’s the latter in ‘Gravy Train’. When Todd decides to spill the beans he needs somewhere to meet the police inspector he liaises with, in order to pass on his reports. I could have chosen somewhere dark and secretive, but that seemed a little too formulaic – and a little too risky for Todd. Get caught with a female copper in a place no one would ever go and it’s hard to explain it away. Get caught chatting by the boating lake and you can at least say you’re catching up with an old flame. Which in his case isn’t so far from the truth.

He risked a sideways glance. Not in uniform now, just jeans and a belted mac. Was she off-duty, or did she always dress like that? She was plumper than before, but it had been eleven years. Eleven years during which she’d joined the police and risen through the ranks like yeast through dough. Not like him. He was still at the unproven stage; unleavened, lumpy, raw. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. It’s him, isn’t it? Lord High fucking Ball himself.”

“Oh? Last I heard you were happy working for him.”

He thought about that one. Stared out across the lake, full of ducks and model boats. Thought he saw Bradley’s pallid face, rising from the waters like some Arthurian legend he’d read about at school. He blinked. Nope, not going mad. It was just someone’s over-enthusiastic Labrador. “Not like it used to be,” he said at last. “All gone tits up. I’m not comfortable with some of – well, with what he’s asking me to do.”

“Which is…?”

He swallowed. She wasn’t supposed to ask him that. He couldn’t answer, anyway, not without incriminating himself. “Just… general crap. I want out. Thought maybe…” He stared at the lake again, the trees, the grass, the plants and picnickers and people having fun. He remembered fun, too, once. Fun with her, back in the day. But that had been years ago.

The setting I chose is Cannon Hill park in south-east Birmingham. It was donated to the city as meadow-land by local benefactor Miss Louisa Ann Ryland in 1873 and opened soon afterwards, and it’s perfect in so many ways. For starters, it’s just a short walk from where Todd is based, living in Vernon Ball’s basement in nearby Chantry Road. He can scuttle down there, have his meeting with Inspector Charlton, and still get back in time to wash the car. And secondly, it’s huge. A vast green open space covering over 200 acres, in fact, with 80 acres of formal parkland and 120 acres of woodland and “conservation areas”. It’s the most popular public park in Birmingham, and gets plenty of visitors, so there’s less chance of Todd having to hang around the woods by himself. There are several different entrances for him to sneak in and out of, and plenty of secluded corners and unusual features to hide in or behind.

These include statues, a massive memorial to the fallen of the Boer War, the footings of an old hot-house or conservatory, a working scale model (above) of the Elan Valley reservoirs in Wales that supply Birmingham with its drinking water, and most remarkable of all, an entire medieval pub, the Golden Lion, that was transported and re-erected in the park from nearby Deritend. Along the park’s northern edge it’s bounded by one of Birmingham’s small rivers, the Rea, and also by the modern buildings of the Midlands Arts Centre or MAC (below), which is where Cynthia and her friends appeared from to give Todd a near-heart attack.

“Goodness me, you do turn up in some very unusual places,” said a voice dripping with vinegar.

It was Cynthia, emerging from the MAC café behind them with a screeching gaggle of her friends. Noisier than the fucking geese. No wonder the ducks had fled.

Thank Christ – thank fucking Christ – Charlton was still not in uniform. Even so, she’d been on the local news a time or two, reporting progress on this case or that. It wasn’t impossible that Cynthia would recognise her. What to say? What to do? Think, man, think.

Charlton herself turned into an unlikely guardian angel. “Oh, hello, another girlfriend, Todd? Which one’s this?”

“No, no. No. Nothing like that.” He was stammering, he must look like a fucking idiot, but thanks to her, it looked like domestic embarrassment. Nothing worse. “This is Cynthia Ball. My employer’s wife, you know. Cynthia, Suzanne. Suzanne, Cynthia.”

“Delighted, I’m sure.” Cynthia took Charlton’s outstretched hand in a brief, limp grip, then lost interest in anything so dull. “Just the chauffeur, darling,” he heard her say to her friends. “Out with some woman. How sweet.”

He puffed out his cheeks, wondered if this was how it felt to have an actual heart attack. “Fuck me, that was close.”

Todd hangs onto his cover – just – but the ducks do get their revenge. That particular episode is based on personal experience, which should give everyone a laugh. As for Cannon Hill, it’s still one of my all-time favourite parks, even if I now associate it with big tough guys getting pecked on the arse!

The book is currently on offer as part of the #indiecrimecrawl week, and will also be included in other deals across the summer.

Check my website to keep up with all the latest news, or head to the Down & Out Books bookstore and quote “indiecc20” (until 21st July) to catch that crime crawl deal.

Indie Crime Crawl

I’m dashing in with an extra post today, because I’ve discovered ‘Gravy Train’ is included in the #indiecrimecrawl week of special offers.

This was organised by Fahrenheit Press and includes themselves (obviously!) and several other independent crime publishers – including my own All Due Respect / Down and Out Books.

The offer runs for one week from 15-21 July, includes all the books in the ADR catalogue, and means you can get at least 20% off the book (more if you buy a few more titles and spend over $50). Just head to the Down and Out bookstore, use the code(s) quoted in the banner above, and hey presto!

I’m a little late blogging about this, but there’s still time to catch that ride so jump on board now and see where the journey takes you…

 

All aboard the gravy train

There’s two bits of great news about my book this week.

One, the print version has a permanent (as far as anything is permanent in this life!) price reduction.

And two, the e-book will be on special offer for the whole of August.

So if you want to get your hands on a copy without having to nick £80,000, now’s your chance!

Shunt your engine over to Amazon and clamber aboard for the ride…

A ‘punchy’ review of Gravy Train

There’s a brand new review of ‘Gravy Train’ on Amazon this week, and I’m particularly thrilled by it because it gives the book five stars and a really nice write-up.

Describing the whole thing as ‘punchy’, it praises the love ’em or loathe ’em characters, the fast pace, and the descriptions of Birmingham’s underbelly (more on that in the next few days).

You can read the whole thing here, and if it tempts you into trying the book too then thank you! And I hope you enjoy it every bit as much.

Gravy Train locations #2: Vernon Ball’s lair

Unlike many crime bosses, Vernon Ball (or Ballsy McBollockface as he’s known by at least one of his underlings) doesn’t have a swish office in the city centre, or even a converted garage or factory unit. Instead, he works from home. And what a home. A large, detached, Victorian residence in one of the more prosperous suburbs of Birmingham, with a garden that overlooks the local park and space for a whole apartment in the basement where Todd the chauffeur-cum-bodyguard lives. And he’s very proud of that house:

Ball stood at his office window and stared out at the garden beyond. It was one of the perks of working from home – that and not having to join the daily commute. It was a nice garden, too – long and shady and manicured. A green oasis amongst the city streets. His pride and joy. He certainly paid the gardeners enough to keep it looking smart.

But today, not even the garden could help. Cynthia had been on the attack again. Not literally – he wouldn’t have let her get away with that. But right through breakfast he’d had to endure the endless whine of a slighted wife. Why hadn’t they moved to Edgbaston yet? All the really successful people lived in Edgbaston. All of her friends had houses there. She’d seen a wonderful house only the other day. When was he, Vernon, going to look at it?

The trouble was, he didn’t want to move to Edgbaston, even if it was smarter and more expensive and only three miles away. He liked it here. Moseley was a decent place to live. The house was huge, with plenty of space for his work, and the garden sloped down to the private park, with views over Moseley pool. Show him a swanky house in Edgbaston that could do all that.

I wrote this with a specific location in mind, and as you might have guessed from this excerpt, it’s in the prosperous, leafy suburb of Moseley. Moseley is unusual for a city suburb. It’s only about five miles from the city centre, but you could easily be in another world. The locals refer to it as a village, which seems daft in a settlement of around ten thousand residents, but you only need to go there to see what they mean. There’s a medieval church and rows of shops around what would have been a market place, and there’s still a sense of community. But it’s a long way from suburbia, and has its own slightly ‘hippy dippy’ atmosphere with a thriving café culture, health food shops and galleries. I once saw a district of Paris described as ‘Bobo’ or ‘bohemian bourgeois’ and thought that fitted Moseley perfectly.

I lived in Moseley for many years and know the area pretty well, and there’s one road I thought would be perfect for nefarious goings-on. It’s called Chantry Road, and it runs roughly perpendicular to Moseley’s high street in the general direction of Edgbaston. And it’s posh. Seriously posh, lined with a variety of large Victorian and Edwardian houses which get steadily bigger the further you go down the hill. Some are absolute monsters, with three or four stories, separate coach-houses and other outbuildings, and on one side of the road they do indeed look out over Moseley park.

The park is unusual too, since it’s privately owned, and only accessible to residents of the suburb. When I lived there you quite literally picked up a key; now I believe it’s all done electronically. In spite of living there I only ever visited once, when the Mostly (Moseley… geddit?) Jazz Festival was in town, and found it’s a pretty little oasis of trees, hidden paths and a lake with ducks. Most folk who live in Birmingham probably don’t even know it’s there, or if they do it’s only the locked gates they walk or drive past on the way to work. And because I’ve only been once, I’m with the rest of them – I only have a photo of those same locked gates.

There are probably around a dozen to fifteen houses which fit the description of Ball’s home, and I couldn’t possibly say which one I chose to base his lair on. But the above picture (which I took last year) shows a selection of possible candidates, and gives a good overall impression of what the road looks like. Although I should stress that Ball himself is one hundred percent imaginary and as far as I know all the residents of Chantry Road are upright citizens who don’t run organised crime networks from their homes!

Gravy Train locations: #1 Sandra’s pub

Tonight the usual group have retreated as far as they can to a table near the back. It’s so far from the windows it’s a wonder they can see the dominoes — and a three mile hike to the bar. Not that the windows help much anyway. Too small to let much light into the place, too grimy half the time. Mike’s supposed to keep them clean, but she’s given up asking him. He can’t reach half of them, can’t even clamber on a stool.

She peers at the nearest window now, wincing at the smears. She should probably clean them herself, but it’s just one more job to add to the endless list. And it’s not like the view is anything to write home about. Parked cars, dustbins, buses rumbling past…

This is one of the descriptions of Sandra’s pub, near the beginning of the book. I wanted to conjure up the image of a typical back-street city boozer, rather drab and down on its luck – which many of them are these days thanks to more people preferring to drink at home.

The pub itself doesn’t exist, of course, but the area it’s based in does. Hockley is an inner city area roughly divided into two distinct sections by a busy main road (the A41 Great Hampton Street, if anyone is interested). To the south, slightly nearer the city centre, is the world-famous Jewellery Quarter (left) with its bustling streets of shops, cafes, the odd museum or two and a wealth of jewellery-making workshops. To the north is a quieter zone comprising terraced houses, back-street boozers and factories, crouched in the shadows of the vast Hockley flyover.

And it’s very much in the latter setting that I saw Sandra’s pub. Too far out of town to benefit from the tourist crowds; not far enough to be suburban and cool. Instead it inhabits a twilight world of buses and factory workers and trade waste bins, of punters who take up tables but never quite spend enough.

Anywhere but Hockley, she thinks. She hates the way people talk about it now, as though it’s paradise. It’s all the Jewellery Quarter this and the clubs and bars that, but she knows there’s Hockley and Hockley — and this is the wrong end. Besides, after dark it all looks the same. The kids getting drunk and falling down, the broken glass, the endless pools of sick. And she and Mike are stuck with this: a dead-end hole in a dead-end part of town.

To be fair to Hockley, it really isn’t as bad as I suggest. But Sandra’s had a bellyful and you can’t blame her for wanting to move to a better area of town with smarter properties and customers who spend more.

The building itself is a mash-up of two or three different premises that I’ve either visited myself, or driven past on the bus. One, the Church Tavern (left, not my picture) in Hockley itself, used to be known for its colossal burgers and I went for lunch once with a work colleague – but it’s a little too spick and span for Sandra’s place. Others, such as the Railway Inn (also Hockley) and the Moseley Arms (further afield in the Highgate area) have more of the right look, if not the right location. And the bit about the old codgers playing dominoes comes from something I actually saw, at the Crooked House near Dudley before it got modernised.

I’ve realised that I never gave Sandra’s pub a name. If I had, it would probably have been something grungy like the Brown Cow, Spotted Dick’s or the Mangy Dog, to conjure up the grime and gloom of the area’s back streets. Although I suspect Sandra herself would refer to it as the Arsehole of Nowhere. But who knows, even she might actually come to like the place…

The drapes are pulled, the main lights turned down low, even though it’s a nasty night outside. Dark and beginning to spit with rain. Buses hurtling past. A typical Tuesday in a typical week in autumnal Birmingham. But they don’t need lights for what they’re doing. Just a couple of spotlights on standby, to illuminate their work. One aimed at the banquette by the door, one for where Mike will stand. She turns, and jumps. He’s already there, and with the gloom and the way he’s dressed — black jacket, white tux — it’s enough to give anyone the creeps.

Want to find out more about Sandra, her pub, and what happens to them both? ‘Gravy Train’ is available in print or digital from the Down & Out bookstore, or from Amazon and other retailers.