Billie Morgan

By Joolz Denby

?My name is Billie Morgan. And I am a murderer.? Billie is in her forties, running a little jewellery shop in Bradford, watching over her godson Natty, trying to live a quiet life, trying to forget the past. Because Billie has a lot of past to forget. She was a biker chick, one of the Devil's Own, real hardcore seventies Angels, speed and acid-fuelled road demons. She lived a life that was hurtling out of control and it ended in murder. Now, years later, she has to face the consequences. Beautifully written, dark but never despairing, Billie Morgan is a perfect fusion between social realism and classic noir; a powerful, passionate novel about an inability to wipe evil from the slate of our lives. Taut like a Greek tragedy, the book is a moving, empathetic account of a woman?s heroic attempt to escape her destiny.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852428651
• ISBN13: 9781852428655
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Compelling read

These are my notes for whether or not this would make a decent film adaptation: When a newspaper story on local missing persons dredges up the name of the horrible Terry Skinner, BILLIE MORGAN has to deal with the burden of knowledge of her part in his murder, while continuing to be the concerned family friend to his widow, JASMINE, and son NATHAN. While Billie fears that her crime will be found out, the consequences of her actions haunt her in an entirely different way, playing out in the wrecked lives of Jasmine and Nathan who she has come to love dearly. Boiled down to it's bare essentials, "Billie Morgan" is a story about consequences - not the accepted consequences that society tries to impose, like Jail, but the true, human fall-out of our actions. There is never more than a suggestion that Billie might end up in jail for her crime, and while Billie has a certain amount of fear at the chance she will, we see her keep her secret for the welfare of those around her, even those who have rejected her, more than for herself. The real issue is actually hit upon by the scandal seeking newspaper the Clarion, when they write about the `Disappeared' - those who Society, and therefore the authorities, don't care about because they don't fit a certain type - middle class, blonde, white... "Billie Morgan" is about the underclass who operate outside the System, and for whom the justice imposed by the System isn't justice at all. Billie herself is a great female protagonist - perhaps not the greatest in a long while, as the Kirkus review said, but definitely a compelling and complex heroine. Perhaps her greatest asset is her honesty with herself, thus becoming more human, more relatable, and allowing the reader to admit their own dark secrets to themselves - that maybe, just maybe, they would have done the same thing in Billie's situation and unwittingly murdered a man. As much as Billie is a character who jumps off the page and brings the story alive, the dialogue is so specific and well written; it does a lot to give flavor and character to the story in its own right. Joolz Denby writes the dialect of the lower-class North-Eastern Brit with ease - and while such efforts - for example the Scottish brogue of Irvine Welsh - can often be confusing to the reader, there didn't seem to be any such complications here. For a movie adaptation, maintaining the dialect would be as essential to the characters and place as a Southern U.S. accent would be to a film set in rural Mississippi. The film version would probably have to start somewhere about the middle of the book, and work the two time periods together, using the frame of the newspaper's research to bring out the back story. The film version of this book would have a lot of the important ingredients necessary for a successful film - murder intrigue (although we know who did it, the why and the how of it is withheld until the end), sex, drugs, danger, family skeletons - and social commen