Paul D Brazill's Collection: Brit Grit

A Sort Of Review

(This is not intended to reveal plot points of the following publication).

The Author: Paul D Brazill.

The Book: Brit Grit: Crime Fiction From Britain’s Grubby Underbelly.

Paul D Brazill’s ‘Brit Grit’: Crime Fiction From Britain’s Grubby Underbelly is exactly what it says, the grubby underbelly of Britain.  Whilst the stories contained within this incredibly enjoyable collection are steeped in the atmospherics of noir, they are also paradoxically an ugly and authentic expose of people, the places they inhabit, and an age old adherence to a code of ethics long gone the way of the dinosaur.

While Brazill’s stories are laced with a perpetually ironic humor, the razor sharp comedy is in itself one of the many substantial layers overlapping an astute and dazzling honesty, which daringly approaches the social order and structure of the lower fraternities of the criminal hierarchy. He probably won’t admit to that, but the underlying concerns permeating his work, I, acknowledge despite the chuckles his work produces. That’s not to say Brazill doesn’t know how to pen a crime story in the classic vein he so obviously demonstrates. He does. His world is an alcohol fuelled paranoid road trip through places best forgotten by the characters that sometimes manage to stumble out into the wreckage of their survival only to accept that escape is not forthcoming, nor is the redemption they may inadvertently pursue.

 

Brazill is a writer who embraces his love of crime fiction and gives it his odd skewed bent, investing it with a laconic twist of comedy, and then firing it out into the drink sozzled night. He’s a hell of a writer intent on giving the reader an eyeful of the underbelly...whether they like it or not. Brazill is an upcoming name in crime fiction, and on the basis of this collection it’s not hard to see why.  Cracking fiction from a writer destined for the top of the crime royalty tree.