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Nick Sharman

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Mark Timlin
Pseudonyms include Jim Ballantyne, Tony Williams, Brian Ritterspak
(1950—)

Hard-boiled South London private eye NICK SHARMAN became something of a sensation in England. He and his creator, Mark Timlin, a little sand in the Vaseline of the cozy-loving tea and crumpet mysteries of the late 1980s, both on paper and in real life, injecting a little Stonesy swagger into mystery game.

Like, you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.

Not that the streets of London Town hadn’t turned mean before, mind you. Timlin himself has admitted how much of an influence P.B. Yuill’s series of novels (and subsequent TV series) featuring London private eye James Hazell (and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, out of Boston) inspired him. But Timlin’s Sharman was a whole new thing.

Sure, when we first meet him, in A Good Year for the Roses (1988), Sharman seemed like yet another down-and-out ex-cop. Refreshingly, though, he was no fallen angel. He was a bad boy, bent as a corkscrew, with a moral compass in desperate need of frequent tune-ups, and the bastard didn’t just have a standard-issue booze problem— he doubled down with booze AND dope. Not surprisingly, it all finally caught up with him. He was an ex-cop—and an ex-husband–for a reason.

Not that his personal life had ever been a bed of roses, either. Poor Nick seemed addicted to troublesome women, including his ex Laura, his eleven-year old daughter Judith, his topless model girlfriend Fiona, and his best pal Wanda, who’s dying.

The books are unrepentantly and unapologetically hard-boiled, and Sharman, horror of horrors, tended to speak his mind. He was stubborn and abrasive, keen on cutting corners and not always reliable. Nor did he have many friends left on the police force. Big surprise there.

But he got the job done. And he was tenacious and loyal to his clients and friends, even if his version of getting the job done often involved a lot of hands-on work.

A rather bleak and sometimes violent series, more Spillane than Chandler at times, but it seemed—at least to me—like Sharman was a signal that there was more than tea-slurping DIs and plucky spinsters coming out of the UK crime scene, and that he was some kind of poster child for a new, tougher  wave of British hard-boiled writing.

And the books kept coming. Neither Timlin or Sharman would go away. Soon enough, there was even a series of made-for-TV movies, starring up-and-coming actor Clive Owens, as nice a piece of casting as you can imagine. Naturally things were toned down for television, but it remains eminently watchable and enjoyably crunchy.

Of course, not everyone was in love with Nick. Timlin bounced from publisher to publisher, and the TV films, although popular enough, were deemed “a national disgrace” by The Daily Mail in the wake of the Dunblain mass shooting, and yanked for being too violent.

They thought the TV show was too violent? They oughtta have read the books.

Mind you, Timlin shrugged it off. “As long as the cheque clears,” he remarked. And the books kept coming.

I dunno. At the time, I felt like it was just the right stuff—exactly what I was looking for—I loved those books. And even after the TV show, Timlin continued the series, eventually ringing in at seventeen novels and a couple of short story collections, following Sharman through one hell of a life, through thick and thin (marriage, divorce, bank robbery, assorted girlfriends, hookers, strippers, one-night stands, drugs, shoot outs, bar fights, gangsters, car crashes, hospitalizations, health scares, beatings, an exile on a Caribbean island, etc.), and little Judith eventually growing up to become a police officer herself.

Virtually unknown on this side of the pond, but definately worth investigating.

  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Besides American pulp fiction, author Timlin seems to have a thing for rock’n’roll and pop music, naming various novels and short stories after the songs of such diverse artists as Tom Waits, Steve Forbert, George Jones, Duke Ellington, The Stones and Bob Seger. But he comes across it naturally—in a former life, he was a roadie for rock groups such as T-Rex and The Who. He’s also the author of 101 Best TV Crime Series: Bad Guys, Spies & Private Eyes (2011), a great non-fiction that romps and stomps through some of his favourite TV shows. Not “the best,” but his favourites. Got it?

UNDERT OATH

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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