Romeo's Tune (1990)

When you are an ex-cop and an ex-doper scratching a living as a private investigator in the unromantic streets of south London, you take what you can get. Even a dreary little debt collection job for some toe-rag of a used-car dealer. But when Nick Sharman collects the money due on a classic Bentley he finds himself stepping into another world. A world where a reclusive rock musician in a secluded mansion, complete with its own recording studio – and firing range – broods on the royalties stolen from him by a crooked management – and decides Sharman is just the guy to get them back. Taking the job could be the worst decision of Sharman’s disaster-ridden life. And when rock’n’roll’s godfathers take on the mafia, south London explodes in a maelstrom of violence. Rome’s Tune is an uncompromising thriller from London’s answer to Elmore Leonard.

Praise for Mark Timlin

‘A pure pulp vision closer to Spillane than Chandler. The Sharman books are bloody romances of the South London badlands’

– John Williams

‘As British as a used condom in a fogbound London taxi...’

– Observer

‘The plot races along like a salsa dancer – a guilty pleasure...’

–
Guardian Unlimited

‘It is possible that South London contains some law abiding citizens in conventional relationships but they make no appearance in Timlin’s immoral, wildly enjoyable books’

–
Times

‘The king of the British hard-boiled thriller’

–
Times

‘Full of cars, girls, guns, strung out along the high sierras of Brixton and Battersea, the Elephant and the North Peckham Estate, all those jewels in the crown they call Sarf London’

–
Arena

‘Brit-pulp’s tough guy prize goes to work on Mark Timlin’s Nick Sharman’

– Evening Standard

‘The most impressive aspect of Timlin’s compressed style is the constant juxtaposition of the witty and the tense . . . Brilliantly conveys the dereliction and moral emptiness of the London underworld’

– Sunday Times

‘Grips like a pair of regulation handcuffs’

–
Guardian

‘The plot races along like a salsa dancer – a guilty pleasure...’

–
Guardian Unlimited

‘The mean streets of South London need their heroes tough. Private eye Nick Sharman fits the bill’

– Telegraph

‘Definitely one of the best’

– Time Out

‘Reverberates like a gunshot’

– Irish Times

‘The mean streets of South London need their heroes tough. Private eye Nick Sharman fits the bill’

–
Telegraph

‘Timlin’s South London is well drawn, full of dodgy boozers and villains, dodgier clubs and coppers, cemeteries and second- hand car dealers’

– The Face

‘Hard-boiled storytelling with attitude’

– Daily Mail

Other books by Mark Timlin

A Good Year for the Roses
1988

Romeo’s Tune
1990

Gun Street Girl
1990

Take the A-Train
1991

The Turnaround
1991

Zip Gun Boogie
1992

Hearts of Stone
1992

Falls the Shadow
1993

Ashes by Now
1993

Pretend We’re Dead
1994

Paint It Black
1995

Find My Way Home
1996

Sharman and Other Filth
(short stories) 1996

A Street That Rhymed with 3 AM
1997

Dead Flowers
1998

Quick Before They Catch Us
1999

All the Empty Places
2000

Stay Another Day
2010

OTHERS

I Spied a Pale Horse
1999

Answers from the Grave
2004
as
TONY WILLIAMS

Valin’s Raiders
1994

Blue on Blue
1999

as
JIM BALLANTYNE

The Torturer
1995

as
MARTIN MILK

That Saturday
1996

as
LEE MARTIN

Gangsters Wives
2007

The Lipstick Killers
2009

ROMEO’S
TUNE

MARK TIMLIN

NO EXIT PRESS

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Hazel Madeleine Griffith

who died tragically on the ninth of April 1989.

Mark Timlin
is the creator of South London’s premier private detective, Nick Sharman. Born in Cheltenham, Glos. on 15th June 1944 (at the local borstal requisitioned by the Royal Navy for the use of the WRNS as a maternity home), within nine days he was back in London with his mother and grandmother dodging V2 rockets, and spending most days under the kitchen table in the family’s Kilburn home. When Timlin was seven, the family relocated to Tulse Hill in south London where he was later educated at the Strand Grammar School in nearby Brixton Hill. As a young adult, Timlin tried a panoply of various jobs: a forklift truck driver, mini cab driver, skateboard manufacturer, roadie for T-Rex and The Who (giving him a healthy sampling of the excesses of the era - which he was later to put to good fictional use). It wasn’t until 1985, faced with another period on the dole, that Timlin decided to add ‘novelist’ to his ever expanding CV.

A Good Year For The Roses
(1988) was Timlin’s answer to the hardboiled noir of 1940s America, uprooted lock, stock and barrel to the dingy back streets of 1980s south London. Nick Sharman, a down-at-heel ex-copper with a gunshot wound in his foot, is opening his own private investigation business in a shop front close to Tulse Hill station when he is hired to track down a teenage runaway named Patsy Bright.

Timlin’s love of vintage cars is reflected in the vehicle that Sharman drives - a shiny E-Type Jaguar, which comes to a sticky end during a particularly frenetic car chase. Combining humour with brutal violence, Timlin’s breezy writing style tapped into the rich tradition of British gangster films such as
Get Carter
(1971) and
The Long Good Friday
(1980) with Sharman himself very much a modern take on the quintessentially American Philip Marlowe-style ‘tec, which mirrors the author’s love of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark, John D. MacDonald et al. More Sharman books followed, with
The Turnaround
(1991) being chosen to launch Sharman’s television career in a one-off pilot starring Clive Owen. Alas, caught in the crossfire of media hysteria concerning screen violence following the tragic Dunblane massacre in March 1996, the series proper was eventually shunted to a late time slot, only managing four more episodes before the plug was pulled. Latterly though, it has enjoyed re-showings and a welcome reappraisal.

Other notable Sharman books include
Pretend We’re Dead
(1994) and
Quick Before They Catch Us
(1999) which dealt with the hot topic of racism in the Asian community, in both London and Manchester.
All The Empty Places
(2000) saw Sharman dealing with the problems of a girlfriend, when a thuggish ex-flame of hers promised violent retribution, and had the surprising plot turn of Sharman leaving the country to live on a Caribbean island. After a long break
Stay Another Day
(2010) sees the return of Sharman to London when his daughter is in danger.

Answers From The Grave
(2004) is a long (for Timlin) stand-alone novel about a criminal family in south London where Sharman makes a guest appearance. Timlin’s nom-de-plumes include Jim Ballantyne, Martin Milk, Tony Williams and (most recently) Lee Martin for his more mainstream novel
Gangsters Wives
(2007). This may have explored the female side of gangland violence, but it still offered the same copious amounts of sex and violence so prodigiously displayed in the author’s previous more male-dominated offerings.

Mark Campbell

An event that changed my life forever.
But I don’t want to write about it myself. Too close you see. So instead, let’s go back to the inestimable and absolutely essential, for any crime fan (but you’ll need deep pockets),
British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia,
where Ali Karim wrote a piece on the series. With thanks to him, Barry Forshaw who edited the two volumes, and Greenwood World Publishing who published them, and kind permission from all, here it is:

Actor Clive Owen was coming into prominence in the mid 1990’s, following his appearance in the TV series Chancer; when he was cast as the tough South-London P.I. Nick Sharman [World Productions for Carlton/ITV] based on the gritty novels by Mark Timlin. As a character, Sharman has his share of problems: a former police officer whose career was derailed due to drink and drugs which also cost him his marriage; he lives on the edge as a private eye scratching a living in the alleyways of south London. He has a daughter, Judith, to support as well as a string of girlfriends and low-lifes who are forever on his case. The young Clive Owen is perfectly cast as Sharman, as he has the bad-boy good looks and a sneer that breathes life into his portrayal of Sharman but, most importantly, his eyes show the pain and the void in his heart brought about from his hard life, living day-to-day and from woman to woman.

The first of the Nick Sharman adventures was the feature-length The Turnaround [1995] based on the book of the same name, and adapted by writer Tony Hoare and directed by Suri Krishnamma. The Turnaround actually follows the novel’s plot closely. Sharman is on a hunt to clear his name, following a case in which he’s hired by a James Webb [Bill Paterson] to find the men who murdered his sister and her family. The case goes seriously off the rails and Sharman is on a race to clear his name as he becomes the principal suspect to the murders. Timlin makes a cameo appearance but blink and you’ll miss him. This episode pilot for the Sharman series attracted 10 million viewers and was the only episode released on VHS.

It was not until 1996 that we’d see Owen return as Sharman in Take the A-Train [Episode 1] with supporting actress Samantha Janus playing a Page 3 model. This time, Sharman investigates the [apparent] suicide of a former police colleague who appears to have thrown himself off a tower-block. Sharman’s investigation gets involved in a gang war in the neon world of club land. Hearts of Stone [Episode 2] is probably the best of the series, due to writer Paul Abbott following the novel’s story closely. Sharman is in pursuit of a couple of heavy-handed debt collectors when he gets roped by former colleagues from the police drugs-squad to infiltrate a dope smuggling operation. It is a mission he can’t refuse as the alternative offered is fifteen years on the wrong side of prison bars. The episode features a manic Keith Allen playing to form. A Good Year for the Roses [Episode 3] is actually based on Nick Sharman’s debut in print, and features a strong performance from Ray Winstone. Sharman is hired as a minder for a lesbian dancing duo when Winstone (playing hard man George Bright) hires Sharman to track down his missing eighteen year old daughter. The case takes a turn for the worse when Sharman finds Bright’s daughter dead, overdosed in a squalid squat. Sharman [Episode 4], the last in the series, was an original screenplay but does feature a scene from Timlin’s novel Pretend We’re Dead and would be the last in this cult series. Apparently due to the uproar about violence on TV, in the aftermath of the Dunblane shootings, Carlton / ITV cancelled Sharman, just as the series was finding its feet. Tragically it has never been repeated on terrestrial or satellite TV, and is long overdue for a DVD release. In this final episode we see Sharman roped into a case of money laundering and dodgy dealings at a local bank. Simultaneously, he’s about to get married. Although Nick Sharman is British, his roots from Timlin’s novels are pure Raymond Chandler as the cynical eye he deploys comes from the American P.I. tradition. Timlin will forever be remembered for Nick Sharman, as Chandler is always associated with Philip Marlowe, and those with long memories will always associate Clive Owen with Nick Sharman, despite whatever he does under the shadow of Hollywood’s famous hills.

Ali Karim