ANGEL ON THE INSIDE
Mike Ripley
Telos Publishing Ltd
17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn,
Denbighshire, LL19 9SH
Digital edition converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited 2010
Angel on the Inside © 2003, 2008 Mike Ripley
Author’s introduction © Mike Ripley
Cover by Gwyn Jeffers, David J Howe
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
One day, God is walking the boundaries of Heaven when
he comes to a section of fence which has fallen down. On
one side are the green fields and sweet air of Heaven, on
the other are the sharp red rocks and sulphurous clouds
of Hell. God is furious at the broken fence and shouts for
Satan to get his arse up here quick. When Satan appears, God
tells him that the upkeep of the boundary fence is his problem
and he’d better get it repaired quick. Satan just laughs and
says ‘Or else what?’ and God fumes: ‘Or else I’ll get my
solicitor on to it.’ Satan really laughs this time.
‘Where are you gonna find a solicitor?’
– Anon, HMP Belmarsh.
So there’s this Good Ole Boy Texan out riding in the
desert and suddenly he’s confronted with a rattlesnake ready to strike,
Osama Bin Laden with an AK47 and a lawyer. But he’s got only two
bullets left in his trusty Colt Peacemaker. What does he do?
Shoots the lawyer twice.
Just to be sure.
– Anon, San Quentin.
This one is for a lot of people: Stephen Habgood of HM Prison Service; the Governor and staff of HMP Belmarsh; John Hopes of Essex Police; Margaret and Joe Maron, my spies on the London Eye; Michael at Gerry’s Club; Tim Coles (again) whose book A Beginner’s Guide to Model Steam Locomotives was an eye-opener; Frankie Fyfield for dubious legal advice; George Rivers of the Association of British Investigators; Sian Best-Harding for vital research beyond the frontier; and especially Amanda ‘Quisling’ Stebbings for cultural advice above and beyond the call of duty. Oh, and for Jessamy for use of the tattoo. Sorry about that.
MR
Angel on the Inside began life in a maximum security prison and almost died less than a year later in a hospital stroke unit.
In 2002, I had published the eleventh Angel tale – Angel Underground – and a non-series comic thriller entitled Double Take, which had started life as a film script – my attempt at an Ealing comedy for 21st Century multi-cultural London. Two earlier Angel titles, both out of print for over five years, were being reissued in paperback, and after a long and frustrating wait, I had finally reclaimed the film and TV rights to my books. I had taken on the monthly Crime File review column on the Birmingham Post following the death of F E (Bill) Pardoe, agreed to serve for three years as a judge for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold and Silver Dagger awards and, as a day job, I was working for the Essex Field Archaeology Unit on a large Romano-British site in Witham, less than a mile from the house where Dorothy L Sayers had lived and worked up to her death in 1957.
Angel Underground had left my main characters with some back issues to be resolved, especially Angel’s soul mate Amy, who had revealed the existence of a previous husband recently released from prison. A vague idea for the next book crystallised into a plotline on the day I was sent to prison with Lindsey Davis!
To be honest, Lindsey (author of the outstanding ‘Falco’ series of Roman private eye mysteries) and I, along with Ruth Dudley Edwards and Paul Charles, were in HMP Belmarsh to give a talk about crime fiction and writing in general. It was a fascinating and rewarding event – for me, if not for the poor inmates who had to sit through it. Sadly, we missed (by a week) meeting one of Belmarsh’s most high-profile guests, Jeffrey Archer, who had just been transferred to another of Her Majesty’s Prisons (or ‘Windsor Hotels’ as one prison officer called them).
I knew Angel had a fan-base in British prisons, and not just among the lads on D Wing in HMP Chelmsford (keep reading, guys), but also among senior HMP staff even at Governor level, where I knew that my books were exchanged and discussed. I had even helped one ex-Governor with his MA thesis on the portrayal of prison and rehabilitation in crime fiction, agreeing to be interviewed and arranging meetings with fellow crime writers.
As a quid pro quo for my help, he arranged an appointment with the Governor of Belmarsh, and the deluxe guided tour I was taken on (the ‘deluxe’ bit being that they let you out at the end of the day) provided me with a shed-load of ideas.
Around the same time, I was contacted by a fan from South Wales who had written to the Daily Telegraph wanting to know where my crime review column had gone. I wrote back to him and told him that the Daily Telegraph had dispensed with my services as a critic, but the Birmingham Post had taken them up. That led to a long correspondence with Len Taylor of Port Talbot and my decision to include warring Welsh gangsters in the plot, with Len as a family ‘boss’.
On a visit to London and to an educational charity where I was doing some mentoring in creative writing, I watched the London Eye directly across the river and thought that had to feature too, if only in homage to the famous scene on the Viennese Ferris wheel with Orson Welles in The Third Man.
I had long wanted to write a scene set in the legendary Gerry’s Club on Dean Street, of which I am still proud to be a member, if only a ‘country member’ these days, so that went into the mix (see Chapters 8 and 9). And the final scenes in Wales, despite all the Welsh jokes, were based on numerous happy trips there in an earlier life to Brain’s breweries (Old and New) in Cardiff and on family holidays in Tregaron in a cottage loaned to us by that shy and retiring, but incredibly generous, book dealer, George Harding.
With everything in place, I wrote Angel on the Inside in just under three months, delivering the manuscript before Christmas 2002 and completing the copy-editing in early January 2003 with a view to publication of the hardback in March.
And then everything went a bit strange.
With one of those masterly ironies that life throws up, I suffered a stroke just at a time when I was losing weight, drinking less, smoking less and doing a demanding, outdoor, physical job that had all resulted in me being leaner and fitter than at any time in the previous 25 years.
Initially paralysed down the left side and unable to speak, I was not in any sort of shape to worry about the book’s launch, which was just as well, as it seemed to pass totally unnoticed. I had no idea that my then publishers had suddenly decided to drop the Angel books completely, not even producing a paperback edition of this latest title as they had with previous ones.
Consequently, Angel on the Inside appeared with no promotional fanfare and garnered only three or four reviews, although Peter Guttridge (Observer), Philip Oakes (Literary Review) and Professor Bernard Knight, despite being Welsh, were all particularly kind.
It was not until some six months later that I learned that the book was not to be paperbacked, by reading the publisher’s catalogue for 2004 and discovering I was not in it!
But now, finally, the twelfth novel in the series, often referred to in hushed tones wherever book dealers meet as ‘the missing Angel’, makes it into paperback for the very first time, almost exactly 20 years after Just Another Angel (Telos Publishing) appeared and alongside the latest instalment in the saga, Angels Unaware (Allison & Busby), which may just be the old rogue’s swan song.
You never know.
Mike Ripley
Colchester, August 2008