Grim Street

Gary Comenas
Works of: Fiction
Publisher(s): Jackleton Press

Blanche Webster used to run an exclusive brothel in New York. Now she lives in a council flat on Grim Street in the West End of London. Her son Blake, a private investigator, lives with her.

Blanche supplements her benefits by doing drug runs for an elderly man in Chelsea whose friends have affectionately dubbed “The Old Queen.”

Every Saturday “The Old Queen” has a get-together at his Chelsea flat for his pensioner friends and young hustlers from Soho. He calls it his afternoon soiree. He had no problems finding the lads – he used to be a hustler, himself, in Soho during the 1960s. Now he’s in a wheelchair but still trying to be relevant. For him, the ‘city of night’ has become the ‘city of the afternoon.’

“In his heart he knew he had stayed too long at the fair, but he couldn’t give up – he wanted to stay longer.”

The adventure begins early on in the book when Blanche falls in love with one of the hustlers at the party. What she doesn’t realise is that she’s being set up by ‘The Old Queen’ and his hustler friend for a heist that involves a cat with emerald eyes. Real emeralds.

Blake, meanwhile, becomes embroiled in his own controversy when he ‘accidentally’ causes the fall of one of his clients from the roof of a seedy pub in the backstreets of Kings Cross; the wife of a CEO of a well-known London lingerie company.

By the end of the book, the criminal strands of mother and son become intertwined, leading to an extraordinary outcome, courtesy of ‘The Old Queen.’