ANGEL CONFIDENTIAL
Mike Ripley
Telos Publishing Ltd
17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn,
Denbighshire LL19 9SH
Digital edition converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited 2010
Angel Confidential © 1995, 2011 Mike Ripley
Author’s introduction © 2011 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.
This one is for Guy.
And for all on the collective behind ‘A Shot in the Dark’, because it probably serves them right.
Note: I have taken numerous geographical liberties in this one. Basically just to annoy people.
MR
Angel Confidential followed hot on the heels of Angel City as the second half of a two-book deal for HarperCollins in their Collins Crime imprint, which had, in a rather casual way, replaced the legendary Collins Crime Club – a brand first established in 1930.
Angel City had been the most noir-ish Angel tale to date, so I wanted to get back to comedy if not downright farce. Several of the plot strands were ideas that had been bubbling around for a while. I had planned to feature a dodgy religious cult ever since I had met a fellow crime writer whose husband had walked out one day and signed all their possessions (and house) over to one. The fish anaesthetic featured in the sub-plot does exist and was invented by a firm in Norfolk; its launch being one of the first news stories I covered as a trainee journalist. The idea of a gypsy camp in the social services’ No-Man’s Land where four counties meet and no-one is sure who has responsibility was suggested to me by a Cambridgeshire traffic policeman with several hundred unserved warrants for traffic violations. I also thought it the sort of idea that would have appealed to that other (and far greater) East Anglian crime writer, Margery Allingham, with her sense of the picaresque. The bull-in-a-china-shop image of Angel’s black cab Armstrong charging around inside a classic car museum was something I had wanted to shoehorn into a plot for quite a while, because it just seemed the sort of thing Angel – and Armstrong – would do.
So I had the basic framework of comic ‘set pieces’ but I still needed some sort of narrative engine to progress the plot. I remembered a chance remark by another writer (it was either Reginald Hill or Robert Barnard) who asked me: What sort of a detective is Angel? What they meant (I think) was that as my series’ hero wasn’t a policeman or an investigative official of any sort, how did he come to be involved in all those shady goings on? Just luck, good or bad, I suppose was probably what I answered, though it got me thinking.
I had always followed the philosophy that Angel could do this ‘crime fighting’ business basically by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and by falling over clues rather than detecting them. After all, it was funnier that way, wasn’t it? I was convinced that Angel, with his high quotient of streetwise experience (‘More street-cred than wheel-clamps’, as someone kindly said) was the ideal detective in his particular world; a world free of responsibilities, paperwork and the need to provide – or even bother to look for – evidence that would stand up in court. Yet as it began to coalesce, the plot of the as-yet untitled Angel #6 seemed to demand a detective who actually detected things. Now the last thing Angel could be was a police detective, so how about a private eye?
Even better; why not team Angel – reluctantly – with an inept private eye, a female private eye? The running gag would be that he could do the detecting business standing on his head, but the last thing he wanted was a job with all the attendant responsibilities. She desperately wanted to be the responsible, professional, private detective but was actual pretty rubbish at it.
So the character of Veronica Daphne Blugden was born, and she was to team up with the book’s femme fatale (or one of them) to form the all-female Rudgard & Blugden Confidential Enquiries agency: R & B Investigations.
With Angel acting as unpaid consultant, foil and straight-man to these two would-be private eyes, the title Angel Eyes seemed to me to be totally appropriate. At the last minute, though, HarperCollins discovered they had reservations, as the company had already signed up an Angel Eyes, by the well-known American thriller writer Eric van Lustbader. Someone had to give way and inevitably it was me, so I suggested Angel Confidential for no other reason than I had greatly enjoyed James Ellroy’s LA Confidential.
(I did get to use the title Angel Eyes for a short story in the 1999 anthology Fresh Blood 3, a story that was narrated by Veronica Blugden and that, for the first and only time, gave a physical description of Roy Angel, the lad himself.)
My Confidential came out in hardback in 1995 and was greeted with over-generous reviews, especially from the right-wing Sunday Telegraph and the left-wing Tribune. It was just the sort of review coverage I had come to expect, which is a very dangerous state of affairs. As one of my thriller-writing icons, Len Deighton, was later to tell me: Two things destroy writers – alcohol and praise.
At the time, however, things seemed to be going swimmingly. Even before the book came out, I was asked by HarperCollins to consider another two-book deal with another, improved advance. Naturally I assumed that paperback sales of Angel City were proving healthy – if fact they weren’t – and of course I was very flattered, but the truth was I’d had an idea for a book that would fill in the back-story of Angel’s life, and the prospect of writing that consumed me to the extent that I could not see the next one until I had that one off my chest. There were other considerations too. The television rights to Angel were due to revert to me in 1996 from the production company that had held them for six years and done nothing with them. I knew – or I thought I knew – that Yorkshire TV were interested in buying an option, and HarperCollins were convinced there would be other offers once ‘we’ had the rights back.
I also still had a day job in London, as Director of Public Relations for the Brewers & Licensed Retailers Association, as the Brewers’ Society was now called, which had started to involve frequent trips to Milan (to sell British beer and pubs to the Italians) and to Brussels (to protect British beer and pubs from everyone else in Europe). Back in East Anglia, my family had grown to include a son as well as two daughters and we had moved into a bigger house in a smaller village.
Consequently, rightly or wrongly, I turned down the two-book deal but signed a contract to write one more novel, Family of Angels, which was published in 1996 alongside the paperback edition of Confidential. I had no idea that it would be my last book for HarperCollins, as not long after publication, the decision was taken, without warning or any chance at negotiation, to drop the series.
And I assumed that that would be that, until other, smaller, publishers began to show an interest in keeping the old rogue in print.
But it was my old friend and former Collins Crime Club stable-mate Walter Satterthwait who provided the key piece of inspiration when he said: ‘Those two girls in Angel Confidential, they were really good characters, you should use them again.’
Walter’s advice was sound (for once!) and, as Evelyn Waugh once said: writers should never kill off good characters, as they are so difficult to create.
So R & B Investigations began to play a major part in the rather bonkers career path of Fitzroy Maclean Angel, and fairly soon the inevitable happened and he went to work for them.
I had once tried to end the Angel saga by marrying him off in That Angel Look in 1997, but that hadn’t worked. Perhaps doing the unthinkable and giving him a regular job would do the trick …
Mike Ripley
Colchester, 2010