Night and the City

by Gerald Kersh

Book Overview

The first title in ibooks' series of classic mysteries by Gerald Kersh. Harry Fabian has a dream to become the top wrestling promoter in London, but he has a problem: he needs money. Not too much -... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000ZDKWUA
• Release Date: January 1946
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"And Some Fools Say There's a God!"

This book was published in 1938. It's Gerald Kersh's best-known work, a memorable 20th century novel of the London netherworld and one of the better examples of British noir. It depicted the fall of a small-time crook who'd do anything for money and the rise of an artist who struggled to protect his creativity. It blended a concern with depravity and morality with an exuberant style. It's been called a cross between Graham Greene and the American hard-boiled school. The most memorable character was the crook, Harry Fabian, obsessed with his own reputation and desires, dreaming of the big time, needing always to impress. Linked to him were a number of other characters, with problems of their own. The book was set in the West End and depicted parts of the London netherworld with which Kersh was clearly familiar: a nightclub, a wrestling hall, prostitution, blackmail, seedy bars, middlemen working on the edge of fraud. This was where the writing seemed especially strong. The author must have delighted in showing all the voices he could do: West End, Cockney, educated crook, middle-class suburbanite, Jewish businessman and working women -- and Fabian himself, a London native who liked speaking American. In one segment, the author even wrote from the point of view of a cat. Other sections excelled in showing the psychology of the morally flawed: a compulsive liar, a compulsive buyer, a gambler, and in describing assorted other bizarre characters. Great set-pieces included Fabian's search across the West End for a mark, a nightclub owner's explanation of a club's operation, a wholesaler's scramble to raise cash, two traders negotiating a deal, a shopping spree, a crazed visit to a club -- including a drunken shift forward to the morning -- a wrestling match, a desperate gambling match. This book showed me where Hubert Selby and many others must've drawn some inspiration. In the second half of the book, the author seemed to rely increasingly on characters talking back and forth at each other, with less psychological insight and at times a bit more purple prose. The focus was shifted more frequently away from Fabian and over to the noble artist, which was necessary to complete the morality tale but diminished the thrill of the writing for me -- the author's skill lay so much more in depicting the bad than the good. And by the end, given the main character's grim trajectory through much of the book, it felt like the author had spared him the worst of what he deserved. Excerpts: "He had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long and cumulative experience of the customs of the City. I have mentioned how he could appraise a footstep. He could, by a similar method of spontaneous reasoning, read a face, interpret an expression, calculate how much money you were in the habit of spending, or even decide by the look of you which restaurant or café you would probably frequent. He saw London as a kind of Inferno--a series of concentric areas with Pica

Too tough for some.

He's a guy who'd blackmail a man with a dying wife; sacrifice an aging wrestler in a fight for a meagre profit; sell his prostitute girlfriend, whom he lives off, to white-slavers. He's Harry Fabian, one of London town's low-life, with a humble, street-trader brother that loves him all the same.