Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "woo"
The city and the city
Dead Simple
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
