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The Fountain in the Forest

Tony White (Goodreads Author)

3.43 · Rating details · 162 ratings · 33 reviews

When a brutally murdered man is found hanging in a Covent Garden theatre, Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case. Who is this anonymous corpse, and why has he been ritually mutilated? But as Rex explores the crime scene further, the mystery deepens, and he finds himself confronting his own secret history instead. Who, more importantly, is Rex King? Shif ...more

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Hardcover, 310 pages

Published January 4th 2018 by Faber & Faber

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Goldsmiths Prize 2018 Eligible Books

32 books — 17 voters

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May 23, 2018 Paul Fulcher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018

Update: Disappointingly absent from the Goldsmiths list - but very much worth reading:

Tony White's Fountain in the Forest, the first of a planned trilogy, is a quite extraordinary combination of a controlled Oulipian literary construct, page-turning detective thriller and a politically-charged piece of social history.

The story begins in the present day with the discovery of a violent death in the London theatreland, one where Detective Rex King (the doubly royal name chosen by the author quite ...more

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Nov 30, 2017 Liz Barnsley rated it it was amazing

An extremely clever narrative and a very quirky storytelling style. Loved this one for all it's differences to my normal reads. Full review to follow. ...more

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Jan 04, 2018 Ian Mond rated it it was amazing

Recently, Tim Lott wrote in The Guardian about the demise of literary fiction. He blamed writers eschewing a three-act structure and story for works of “elegant tedium”, shapeless things that promote voice above plot. Lott was offended by writers like Martin Amis, Jonathan Coe and Edna O’Brien actively denigrating story, which, in the words of O’Brien, was for silly boys.

Whether you agree with Lott or not as with all articles of this type it creates a binary based on a limited amount of examples Recently, Tim Lott wrote in The Guardian about the demise of literary fiction. He blamed writers eschewing a three-act structure and story for works of “elegant tedium”, shapeless things that promote voice above plot. Lott was offended by writers like Martin Amis, Jonathan Coe and Edna O’Brien actively denigrating story, which, in the words of O’Brien, was for silly boys.

Whether you agree with Lott or not as with all articles of this type it creates a binary based on a limited amount of examples while asking the reader to choose sides. You either support story-telling and conventional structures or you’re on the side of voice and experimentation. You certainly can’t be both. That’s bullshit, of course, as evidenced by Tony White’s The Fountain In The Forest which, literally, has a three-act structure and deep understanding of the “fundamentals of plot” (to quote Lott) while also being bold and experimental in how it delivers that story. It’s not just that White’s police procedural revolves around the French Republican calendar or that he decides to adopt a mandated vocabulary in the fashion of Georges Perec by featuring all the answers to the Guardian Quick Crossword in 1985 within the body of the novel, it’s also how he plays with the genre with a twist so brazen that, on its own, is a commentary on the police procedural. What’s remarkable is that these experimental flourishes don’t undermine what is a gripping, stunning read. The last of the Lott’s three-acts is as thrilling, page-turning and suspenseful as any pot-boiler anyone will read this year, brilliantly set up by the attention to detail, the little nudges and clues and the odd tangents of the first two acts.

This is a novel that takes its inspiration from the crime/mystery genre and Oulipo (look it up) and somehow brings the philosophies of Tim Lott and Martin Amis together. It’s about the story and about the voice. It’s about the conventional thrills of genre and the excitement of experimentation. The Fountain In The Forest has set a high bar for the rest of the novels I read this year. ...more

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Aug 08, 2018 Tommi rated it really liked it

A mutilated, unidentified body hanging in a theater in central London, and a headstrong detective solving the case amidst bureaucracy; a group of young activists in a rural French village in the 1980s, eager to bring an abandoned bakery back to business. Out of these unlikely elements, Tony White has written The Fountain in the Forest, a detective thriller of unique caliber.

What makes The Fountain in the Forest peculiar in the sense that even the intelligentsia of the literary world have shown i ...more

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Feb 02, 2018 RG rated it liked it

Literary crime to the max. Not the biggest fan of this genre as I'm really big on narrative. Very quirky and strange style. The bold words through me off a little. Very short but I guess as literary crime goes, probably the perfect length. Read this over a week in short bursts, so didnt grab my attention as other crime novels do. ...more

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Jan 02, 2018 Thebooktrail rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-set-in-london, book-set-in-france

Visit the locations in the novel my link text

Authorsonlocation Meet The author

This is a wonderfully unique, quirky and cheeky read. I say that as I’ve had to wait a while after reading it until I knew what I wanted to write. Why so tricky?

There are lots of hidden gems in this book. Quite uniquely, it’s a novel and plot driven by place. Yes please! and there are plenty of them. It’s like a mini history lesson – from the London theatres and streets to the hilltop towns and bayous of the Cote d’Azu ...more

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Mar 15, 2018 Marc Nash rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

See, it is possible to write a genre book with high literary values which far from getting in the way of the plot, take it on to another level. A book about corruption of societal roles with responsibility, in this case two policemen from different countries embroiled in a battle to the death as to which is the more corrupt.

Taking in state undermining of Green movements, alternative lifestyles that corrupt the undercover officers who penetrate these communities and groups they're charged with de ...more

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Jun 15, 2018 Marcus Hobson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There are a lot of surprises in this novel. Looks can be deceptive. Interesting facts about how the book is written will not emerge until the end.

We start in London's West End, where police are investigating a murder. A man has been found hanging among the scenery of a theatre. Detective Sergeant Rex King knows the man who paints the scenery, and he has disappeared. No-one knows who the corpse is. What follows is a lot of police procedure. At one point I got very bogged down with the acronyms. N There are a lot of surprises in this novel. Looks can be deceptive. Interesting facts about how the book is written will not emerge until the end.

We start in London's West End, where police are investigating a murder. A man has been found hanging among the scenery of a theatre. Detective Sergeant Rex King knows the man who paints the scenery, and he has disappeared. No-one knows who the corpse is. What follows is a lot of police procedure. At one point I got very bogged down with the acronyms. Not just the acronyms but the nick-names for the acronyms. Yes, they lend a certain authenticity, but I'm only going to be living inside this book for a few days and I'm going to struggle to remember them or need them ever again.

Progress on the case is slow. There are no leads. An internal investigation is looming, an old court case may get resurrected. Rex King goes back to the crime scene and finds a knife and some puzzling writing on the wall. Finally they have something to work with. Turns out the writing is something from the French Revolutionary Calendar, which measured time from Year 1 of the Revolution. Ten day weeks and thirty day months, where each day celebrated a different item of everyday rural life, herbs, foodstuff, livestock or tools all featured. There are thirty chapters in the book, starting with the 'Common Fumitory' and ending with the 'Hornbeam'.

Suddenly after thirteen chapters on the case, we switch away from London and to the South of France. Soon it become clear that we have moved back in time to the nineteen eighties. A young British lad called JJ joins a commune of hippies, intellectuals and artists up in the hills behind Nice. Now I am struggling to find any link whatsoever with what has happened in the first thirteen chapters. I am enjoying the story of life in southern France, so I go with the flow for ten chapters. Characters emerge and plot lines develop. JJ falls in love with a beautiful French girl.

Then everything happens, everything comes together in a rash of unexpected twists in the tale. I will say no more, other than the fact I wasn't expecting any of it. Brilliant.

There are seven pages of Author's Notes at the end. From it we discover that not only is the Revolutionary Calendar following the course of a specific period of time, three months in 1985, but author Tony White has used something called a "mandated vocabulary". The most famous example of this I know is George Perec's novel called 'A Void' in which he does not use the letter e. This is always tinged with humour for me, as he goes to so much trouble to avoid the letter, but with his names on the front cover, title page and spine, there are in fact four e's for each repetition of his name. I also pity the translator, who has done a doubly heroic job to translate from the French to the English and still avoid the letter. In The Fountain in the Forest, White uses all the solution words from The Guardian Quick Crossword from each one of those days in 1985. I knew there was something going on with the words, as there were a few in bold in the text of each chapter, but as I rushed along with the plot I didn't pause to see if there was a link or reason for it. I'm glad I didn't try as I would never have discovered anything from a random sequence like that. I think there was only one occasion, where we spiralled off into a rabbit hole about Jean-Luc Picard and Star Trek, that I thought, why was that necessary?

A great story if you like your mysteries on multiple levels. ...more

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Jan 23, 2019 Emma Curtis rated it it was amazing

Loved this book. I didn't know what to expect when I picked it up, but was immediately drawn in. It's clever, surprising and beautifully written. A police procedural with a difference. ...more

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Jan 26, 2018 Carole-Ann rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-detective-mystery

If this book is an example of "literary" crime writing, then you can keep it. It's so padded out with ridiculously long, rambling sentences, that I scanned through most of it rather than actually read it.

Essentially, the book is divided into 3 parts: first, current time, where DS Rex King discovers a body in the depths of a theatre; second, 30 years previous, where we find a young British teenager joining an ad hoc group of hippies/rebels in a remote village in Cote d'Azur; and thirdly, back to If this book is an example of "literary" crime writing, then you can keep it. It's so padded out with ridiculously long, rambling sentences, that I scanned through most of it rather than actually read it.

Essentially, the book is divided into 3 parts: first, current time, where DS Rex King discovers a body in the depths of a theatre; second, 30 years previous, where we find a young British teenager joining an ad hoc group of hippies/rebels in a remote village in Cote d'Azur; and thirdly, back to the present with the necessary look back at the 80's.

The occurrence of the bold type in certain words baffled me at first until I looked at the END for the authors notes. From then on, it just became ANNOYING. There is no reason, and NO advantage to use these words in the narrative. It became obvious that these LONG sentences including these words were (mostly) there 'for the sake of it' and didn't enhance the story at all.

Also, in the first part, the use of acronyms and slang for police departments involved in a crime, became overpowering. (But at least that was only in the first part!) There was a little 'muddying of the waters' too with the introduction of some of King's early reminiscences as a teen; and that of a "Death in Custody" case, of which he was in charge. The actual murder investigation took an early back seat.

The second part, in the village of the Title, seemed to belong to another story AND another person. The use of the French Revolutionary Calendar was inadequately explained, so I tried to figure out WHY USE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE? After finishing the book, I decided it was an affectation in trying to produce a literary work.

The third part was a mish-mash of 1 and 2; and if I thought it muddled or vague before, this time it certainly became (almost) incoherent. I did not understand why the Battle of the Beanfield was used; nor why there were so many mentions of the Miner's Strike but had nothing to do with the story unfolding. Perhaps if only to give an impression of the 80's themselves?? And jumping between then and now make me blink hard more than once!!

And I think that's why I didn't like it: there were too many NON-CONNECTED links or mentions of things which were not relevant. It's not a police-procedural at all; it's not even a straight-forward remembering of times past; and the reasoning at the end for the murder, defies logic (IMHO).

As an attempt at literary fiction it's just reinforced my opinion that I'm good to leave it alone.

A good review from the Financial Times is here:
https://www.ft.com/content/1ea28a48-0...
...more

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Apr 05, 2018 Andy Theyers rated it liked it

Shelves: crime

Largely, I fear, I didn't enjoy this as much as I could because it's been billed as "Literary Crime" when it's really only LitFic. The fact that Act 1 bears all the hallmarks of a (good, if lightweight) police procedural isn't enough to make it "crime". Act 2 - the "literary" bit - is really enjoyable, and a surprise. Act 3 is what stops it being crime. It's just too lightweight to be either "crime" or "thriller". This is a real example of how the way a book is marketed directly affects the way ...more

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Mar 21, 2019 Jiaqi rated it it was ok

unbelievably masturbatory. i was really looking forward to seeing how all the dictated vocabulary and revolutionary calendar stuff was going to slot into the murder mystery but it wasn't interesting enough to go beyond mere gimmick. the writing was so awkward and was clearly made even more blundering by the guardian crossword answers, whose significance, again, does not seem strong enough for their inclusion. completely inconsistent narrative. this is the book written by your high school friend' ...more

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Jan 16, 2020 Adam Carson rated it liked it

Is probably give this 3.5 - it’s a clever plot, engaging and hugely character driven throughout, but at times feels like a victim of its own cleverness.

Firstly, I’m not entirely sure I’d classify it as a crime novel - there’s a crime in it for sure, but this is a character tale first and foremost. I liked the contrast between part 1 and 2 of the book - telling 2 different stories linked in the third part. That said the change of pacing and style is incredibly jarring - to the point I initially ...more

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Dec 20, 2017 emmabbooks rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Murder, Mystery, Literature

A brutally murdered man is found at a London Theatre. Solving the murder is just one of the themes of this beautifully written modern literature novel.

Set mostly in 1985 DS Rex King has not only a murder on his hands, but his friend has gone missing and work is not going as smoothly as he'd like. Policing techniques at that time are explored as King's murder investigation takes us through the streets of London and into the theatre world. Later the story takes us back t ...more

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Jan 25, 2018 Katarine rated it it was ok · review of another edition

The cover notes state that this novel "transforms the traditional crime narrative into something dizzyingly unique". That may be so but for me that wasn't a good thing. The basic story had merits - an unidentified body is discovered in a back set of a London theatre and the unravelling of the mystery scoots between France and the UK and between the 1980s and the present time. The main character, Rex King, was interesting and real and there were some unexpected twists. Now here is the but - the d ...more

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May 07, 2019 Richard Wilcocks rated it really liked it

Very clever, and what's the word... educational. I was reminded of the Battle of Stonehenge, when a convoy of drugged-up, festival-going utopians was brutally attacked by the police, and the sinking of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior by the French secret service in New Zealand, for a start. Then there is the evidence of Tony White's research into what happened on the French Riviera in the Second World War, when the Italian fascists grabbed a chunk of it and renamed Nice as Nizza. The police procedu ...more

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Apr 25, 2018 Todayiamadaisy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-mystery

I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped. It's a literary crime novel in three parts: it begins in present-day London, where Detective Sergeant Rex King is investigating a murder while being investigated for his role in an old death in custody case; it moves to a commune in rural France in 1985; in the third part it moves back to present-day, with occasional flashbacks to tie it all together. There's a weirdly stilted quality to the writing, with some words bolded, which turns to be because the ...more

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Jan 25, 2018 Gary Budden rated it it was amazing

The Fountain in the Forest begins as a London crime novel and intriguing police procedural, before mutating into something very different, examining the ripple effects of key events across history: the past is never truly past.

Tying a slightly-fictionalised contemporary London to the brutal Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, a French commune of hippies, punks and idealists, the French Revolutionary Calendar, and back further in time taking in events from World War Two and Fascist Italy, this is a ...more

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Feb 27, 2018 Titus Hjelm rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I'm slightly biased because I took Tony's writing workshop some years ago while he was visiting our school and think he's a great guy. Foxy-T was great, but demanding for a non-native speaker. Charlieunclenorfolktango was demanding for the same reason, but also because of its rather experimental style. The Fountain in the Forest retains the quirkiness and social commentary that I liked about the earlier work, but is much more approachable. The Oulipo-technique sometimes draws attention away from ...more

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Jun 02, 2019 Jacquie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I enjoyed this book enormously. It's a detective novel written to self imposed oulipian rules and a social history of a period of the mid eighties when the policing that was developed to break the miners strike were used elsewhere.
I have a friend with whom I read detective novels, reading simultaneously and comparing notes. I played The Macbeth Murder Mystery game with this, not telling him it was anything other than a police procedural. I am not sure what he will think of the flagrant floutin ...more

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Nov 26, 2018 Sara Aye Moung rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I wasn’t sure how I was finding this book when I began reading it. I was slightly put off by the forced “ulipo” approach and the introduction about the revolutionary calendar. However once I got in to the book I was able to forget these and very much enjoyed this both as crime fiction but also the evocation of the 80s in the flashbacks.

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Apr 07, 2019 Sam Davison rated it liked it

Ambitious, beautifully written but one needs to suspend belief to embrace the premise.

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Jun 19, 2019 Elise rated it really liked it

Shelves: didn-t-finish

An ambitiously literary remake of a police procedural by a very clever wordsmith.

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Nov 21, 2019 Aaron rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Poms doing Oulupo with cops, anarchist hippies, a bizarre murder, casual police brutality and LSD. Yeah its all very Stewart Homey and meta, but fuck it, it was a fun and intelligent read.

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Nov 08, 2020 Viola rated it liked it

Tony White (born 1964, Farnham, Surrey) is a British novelist, writer and editor. Best known for his novel Foxy-T (Faber, 2003), described by Toby Litt in 2006 as his 'favourite British novel from the past ten years', White has been called a ‘serious, engaging voice of the modern city'. Since 2010 he has been chair of London’s arts radio station Resonance FM.

White's first novels Road Rage (Low Life Books, 1997), Satan Satan Satan (Attack Books!, 1999), and Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999) Tony White (born 1964, Farnham, Surrey) is a British novelist, writer and editor. Best known for his novel Foxy-T (Faber, 2003), described by Toby Litt in 2006 as his 'favourite British novel from the past ten years', White has been called a ‘serious, engaging voice of the modern city'. Since 2010 he has been chair of London’s arts radio station Resonance FM.

White's first novels Road Rage (Low Life Books, 1997), Satan Satan Satan (Attack Books!, 1999), and Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999) – 'bizarre, depressing and unreadable' (LRB) – have been located on the ‘marginal terrain of avant-pulp’, where writers such as Stewart Home and Victor Headley 'channel the energy and drive of pornography, the skinhead paperbacks of Richard Allen and the cartoon anarchism of Leo Baxendale's Beano comics to escape the stylistic and rhetorical corsets of the metropolitan novel'. In 2006 the Russian publisher, T-ough Press faced criminal prosecution for publishing Russian language translations of Satan Satan Satan and Road Rage.

Both the title and the triangular relationship at the heart of Foxy-T recall D. H. Lawrence's 1922 novella The Fox, but it was White's use of a hybridised, street language of London's East End in which the novel is entirely written, which drew most attention.[6] Some reviewers referred to it as ‘broken, rhythmic patois’, or ‘Benglish’, and White was interviewed about his use of language by Ed Stourton on Radio 4’s Today programme. White himself has written that it was the

“language that I was hearing all around me in east London at the time, where white, Asian and other mainly (but not exclusively) young people were adopting or hybridising Black British language and in so doing were disrupting what had been the very necessary identity politics of the 1970s and 80s: a disruption typified for me by young Bangladeshi rudeboys calling each other ‘Rasta’ and most easily illustrated by the fact that it became impossible to determine the ethnicity of an unseen speaker (e.g. someone sitting behind you on the bus) by the sound of their voice.”

White’s novella, Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma, 2012), was commissioned to accompany a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson reflecting upon the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Set in Leeds it was written using an Oulipo-style constraint, in this case a 'mandated vocabulary,' with each daily chapter told using all of the answers to the Guardian Quick Crossword from that day in 1986.

Another novella, Missorts Volume II (Situations, 2012) was published as a free ebook to accompany White's Missorts app, a permanent, GPS-triggered, immersive soundwork for mobile phones that is activated in the Redcliffe area of Bristol as a public art work. Missorts Volume II follows the lives of four characters affected by a derelict former Royal Mail sorting office adjacent to Bristol Temple Meads railway station.

White co-edited the short story collection Croatian Nights (Serpent's Tail, 2005), with Borivoj Radaković and Matt Thorne, which featured both British, Croatian and Serbian authors, and Britpulp! (Sceptre, 1999). His own short stories have appeared in various periodicals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans (4th Estate), edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne.

Other Work

In 2006 White’s Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West (Cadogan, 2006) was published; a travelogue 'from Belgrade to Split, reporting the words of a people confused by shame, pride and hope, trying to make sense of brutal murder and hatred, managing to create something universally valuable from their lives and their history' in the post-Yugoslav republics.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_White ...more

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Nov 15, 2017 Nadia rated it liked it

Thank you to Faber and Faber books for the free copy of this novel, given in exchange for a review on goodreads.
- - -

How do you feel about revenge? I love the idea of retribution, and of fate righting wrongs. There is a good dose of revenge in White's novel, and a few skeletons let loose out of Detective Rex King's closet.

The Fountain in the Forest is wonderfully creative in form (highly successfully so), and tremendouly cheeky in content.

I loved his experiment with form and the two challenges Thank you to Faber and Faber books for the free copy of this novel, given in exchange for a review on goodreads.
- - -

How do you feel about revenge? I love the idea of retribution, and of fate righting wrongs. There is a good dose of revenge in White's novel, and a few skeletons let loose out of Detective Rex King's closet.

The Fountain in the Forest is wonderfully creative in form (highly successfully so), and tremendouly cheeky in content.

I loved his experiment with form and the two challenges White explicitly set himself. First, each chapter contains a fixed set of words (in bold in the text) that are the answers to crosswords he used to love, and came across again during his research for this book. There are only about 20-or-so such words in each chapter, and so they do not affect the flow of the text, but after a time, one can see how the narrative has taken shape around them. The effect was sleek, and flawless. Second, White gives a clue to the mystery of this story through the titles of the chapters. The titles are the names of a day in the French revolutionary calendar, invented in 1793. A smooth and effective history lesson right there.

In terms of style, White is a lot of fun, I am always fond of play on registers and White goes up and down the vocabulary scale effotlessly from erudite to downright grimy (expect a well rounded number of piss, cock, fuck).

As for content, this novel is best approached as the mysterious story of Rex King who happens to work as a detective in London, rather than as a detective novel. Why? Because the story opens with detective Rex called to the scene of a murder, and after an introduction of who Rex is and what his team is about to deal with, White stops addressing the investigation or its progress.

Instead, post crime scene and intro, the novel goes off on a tangent, a good 30 years prior to present events, in a French village in which a small community of punk-anarchists has elected residence. It is once this story inside the story takes a turn (up to two thirds of the novel by then) that you will see Tony White pulling his tongue at you to reveal in a cheeky fashion what the tangent represents.

I greatly enjoyed discovering I had been taken on a ride. But my only warning to other readers is that I was glad I hadn't given up on this book by then, because I had thought of giving up on it a few times.

The reason is that I do not enjoy narratives driven by place-descriptions, unless they tie in with emotions, and I couldn't find any here. I felt drowned and breathless several times in sentences only about a physical place (or a sexual fantasy, itself a physical place) that took my heart nowhere, least of all fast. These descriptions were often long sentences, up to one-and-a-half page at times (a well-known style of composition in French lit but not a success here). This slowed down the unfolding of the story considerably.

There is a lot of enjoyment to be had from reading this novel, provided the reader has been forewarned about the novel's pace and its descriptive character. The big reveal at the end is delightful.
...more

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Oct 12, 2017 David Gullen rated it it was amazing

This engaging and absorbing story starts as a classically police procedural – crime scenes are described in close detail, and the police methodology feels as authentic as the attitudes and banter of the police themselves. DS Rex King of the Metropolitan Police is an outsider of a cop, a man who doesn’t fit in. He’s the perfect man to investigate the murder of an unknown man found hanging and mutilated in his friend’s theatrical studio.
Except he’s not. He has a deeply awkward personal relationsh ...more

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May 21, 2019 Helen Meads rated it really liked it · review of another edition

One can tell almost straight away, but without doubt from the beginning of Part 2, that this novel has some academic insertions and is influenced by some form of French philosophical theory (possibly Foucaudian).

The author’s notes at the end explain some of them. The emboldening of certain words in the text is irritating and would have been cleverer if the words had been included without being so unsubtly signalled.

That said, parts 1 and 3 were riveting, making up for the particularly boring bit ...more

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Jan 06, 2019 sappho_reader rated it it was ok · review of another edition

It would be prudent to read the sections at the beginning and the end which describes the 18th Century French Revolutionary calendar and the answers to particular UK crossword puzzles. This is essential since this book deals heavily in word antics (or games?) and otherwise you would be left thinking WTF are random words highlighted? But aside from the experimental aspects of this book I was somewhat bored by the story. What a shame as this book was strongly recommended to me and since it is not ...more

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May 02, 2018 Vuk Trifkovic rated it it was ok

Decent enough, but "dizzyingly original" I'm not so sure about. It's kind of tricksy but in the least impressive way possible. So the author shoe-horned words from the crossword puzzle from the relevant days in 1985-86. Yet, to show off, he then bolded the words up. Big whoop.

It's a solid police procedural with a good but mistimed twist. If it weren't set around Lambs Conduit Street, one of my favourite parts of London, I would not have bothered. ...more

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About Tony White

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Tony White (born 1964, Farnham, Surrey) is a British novelist, writer and editor. Best known for his novel Foxy-T (Faber, 2003), described by Toby Litt in 2006 as his 'favourite British novel from the past ten years', White has been called a ‘serious, engaging voice of the modern city'. Since 2010 he has been chair of London’s arts radio station Resonance FM.

White's first novels Road Rage (Low Lif Tony White (born 1964, Farnham, Surrey) is a British novelist, writer and editor. Best known for his novel Foxy-T (Faber, 2003), described by Toby Litt in 2006 as his 'favourite British novel from the past ten years', White has been called a ‘serious, engaging voice of the modern city'. Since 2010 he has been chair of London’s arts radio station Resonance FM.

White's first novels Road Rage (Low Life Books, 1997), Satan Satan Satan (Attack Books!, 1999), and Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999) – 'bizarre, depressing and unreadable' (LRB) – have been located on the ‘marginal terrain of avant-pulp’, where writers such as Stewart Home and Victor Headley 'channel the energy and drive of pornography, the skinhead paperbacks of Richard Allen and the cartoon anarchism of Leo Baxendale's Beano comics to escape the stylistic and rhetorical corsets of the metropolitan novel'. In 2006 the Russian publisher, T-ough Press faced criminal prosecution for publishing Russian language translations of Satan Satan Satan and Road Rage.

Both the title and the triangular relationship at the heart of Foxy-T recall D. H. Lawrence's 1922 novella The Fox, but it was White's use of a hybridised, street language of London's East End in which the novel is entirely written, which drew most attention.[6] Some reviewers referred to it as ‘broken, rhythmic patois’, or ‘Benglish’, and White was interviewed about his use of language by Ed Stourton on Radio 4’s Today programme. White himself has written that it was the

“language that I was hearing all around me in east London at the time, where white, Asian and other mainly (but not exclusively) young people were adopting or hybridising Black British language and in so doing were disrupting what had been the very necessary identity politics of the 1970s and 80s: a disruption typified for me by young Bangladeshi rudeboys calling each other ‘Rasta’ and most easily illustrated by the fact that it became impossible to determine the ethnicity of an unseen speaker (e.g. someone sitting behind you on the bus) by the sound of their voice.”

White’s novella, Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma, 2012), was commissioned to accompany a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson reflecting upon the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Set in Leeds it was written using an Oulipo-style constraint, in this case a 'mandated vocabulary,' with each daily chapter told using all of the answers to the Guardian Quick Crossword from that day in 1986.

Another novella, Missorts Volume II (Situations, 2012) was published as a free ebook to accompany White's Missorts app, a permanent, GPS-triggered, immersive soundwork for mobile phones that is activated in the Redcliffe area of Bristol as a public art work. Missorts Volume II follows the lives of four characters affected by a derelict former Royal Mail sorting office adjacent to Bristol Temple Meads railway station.

White co-edited the short story collection Croatian Nights (Serpent's Tail, 2005), with Borivoj Radaković and Matt Thorne, which featured both British, Croatian and Serbian authors, and Britpulp! (Sceptre, 1999). His own short stories have appeared in various periodicals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans (4th Estate), edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne.
Other Work

In 2006 White’s Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West (Cadogan, 2006) was published; a travelogue 'from Belgrade to Split, reporting the words of a people confused by shame, pride and hope, trying to make sense of brutal murder and hatred, managing to create something universally valuable from their lives and their history' in the post-Yugoslav republics.

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