Birth Of A Dead Story

Birth of a dead story. An experience from my youth. I was a frequent visitor to a nightclub and got to know the men on the door. Within a year I had a part-time job cashing up the tills and helping out on the front desk. Two years before, I had started writing a book about a club but there was no plot and I stopped and started and finally put my attempt at my first book away. As I worked at the club, I began seeing the violent side of drugs and criminal corruption. I knew the characters well and after a year I was sick and angry at what I had seen and experienced. I left and never went back but my anger still simmered inside. You can’t forget some things and that anger stayed with me for a long time. By chance, I was looking through some notes on another book I wanted to write and came across the original draft of the book I had started four years previously. It turned out I had found an outlet for the anger.

I took another look at the story and decided I would wrap the story around a doorman at a nightclub who befriends a lad working there who is a drug addict, and an ex-girlfriend of the doorman who turns up with her gang to take over the local drug supply scene. She already supplies the lad who hates her and wants her dead. Johnny, the head doorman, is torn between his ex and the safety of the lad. The story involves all the drug scenes and corruption of local authority personnel.

The woman is shot by the lad and so is a barmaid who is accidentally shot too. Eventually, the lad escapes to London and decides to call his mother to tell her he is coming home. Meantime we see the difference between a villain’s funeral and that of the young girl in stark contrasting scenes that are all the better for the dialogue. The book ends on a sad note as Johnny leaves the club after a take-over and in London, on his way to the rail station, the lad is picked up by one of his old suppliers and promised help and an offer of a meal and hot shower. It is left to the reader to decide what happens to the boy.

Some of the scenes are graphic and could offend and I decided to start on the next book, The Trojan Towers. Angry Silence stayed silent as my interest and angry state of mind about that club subsided. Now, I am more educated and experienced in the ways of the world, I reflect on the book and know I made a bad decision. If it made me angry and sad then it would have had the same effect on readers. A lesson learned; it’s buried inside a memory stick – the birth of a dead story.