Harry Fabian is a cockney wide boy trying to make it big in the Soho underworld of the 1930s. He is a Flash Harry in an expensive suit, a chancer operating in a cosmopolitan corner of the city where villains, spivs, prostitutes and strong-arm men thrive. But his ambition and reckless nature are pushing him towards more and more extreme acts - and a day of reckoning. Night And The City is a classic work of social-realist fiction that captures the vibrant yet seedy underbelly of London between the world wars. Its author Gerald Kersh was high-profile, prolific and hugely popular at his peak, but would later drift into hardship and obscurity. His writing is now being rediscovered. A maverick character in his own right, Kersh's life was as colourful as those of his most flamboyant creations. As well as a highly respected novel, Night And The City was twice filmed - in 1950 and 1992 - and it is the first of these adaptations that is today regarded as one of the best of the British film-noir genre. Directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark and Googie Withers, it was shot in a post-war landscape heavy with menace and charm - just like the book on which it was based. **

THIEF EXTRAORDINAIRE? Gerald Kersh (1912–1957) wrote amazing novels and hundreds of short stories about the weird and wonderful people he met during his lifetime. The most intriguing was Karmesin, a master thief and self–confessed genius. His robberies, cons and double–crosses involve split–second timing, almost supernatural foresight, and spine-tingling nerve. But is he telling Kersh the truth? For the first time all 17 short stories are collected in a single volume so that you can decide for yourself. This collection is edited and introduced by Paul Duncan, who has been researching Gerald Kersh for over 10 years in preparation for a biography. The cover painting is by Carol Heyer, and the design by Deborah Miller. **

Night and the City (1938) made Gerald Kersh's reputation, but it was as a war novelist that he reached a wide readership in 1942, via a pair of books about British army recruits, led by Sergeant Bill Nelson, preparing to see service in France. This Faber Finds edition collects both books.'[They Die With Their Boots Clean] is a picture of life in the raw in the Coldstream Guards, with all itsrigorous discipline, its humour and comradeship.' TLS[In The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson] the conversations are terse, ferociously slangy, full of hyperbole and outrageous wit, often irresistibly funny.' TLS

'[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes... [Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal... King Jesus is here, all the time... the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare... This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too... We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.'Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961

Best known for his gritty novels of London life and his weird and often horrific short fiction, in Clock Without Hands (1949) Gerald Kersh delivers three novellas, each very different but all showcasing the virtuosity of his storytelling. Clock Without Hands relates the unexpected and macabre impact of a sordid murder on the mild-mannered neighbour who witnesses the crime. In Flight to the World's End, a desperate boy flees his cruel life at an orphanage, only to discover a harsh truth about the world outside. And in Fairy Gold, a clerk plays a malicious practical joke on his impoverished co-worker, with unpredictable and startling consequences. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and...

With The Song Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his famous Night And The City; but this novel concerns a writer, striving doggedly to make his living.'A remarkable novel... with this book Mr Kersh has taken a big step forward.' Sunday Times'[Kersh] has a remarkable talent... he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before... [The Song of the Flea] is the story of John Pym, a young man trying to earn his living as a writer... Mr Kersh draws on his picturesque and convincing knowledge of human vileness in a manner which is both entertaining and instructive.' Times Literary Supplement.

This collection of 37 stories by a master of the form features tales that are sometimes funny, sometimes violent, and sometimes weird and nightmarish: in short, it is quintessential Gerald Kersh. Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This is the first-ever reprint of Neither Man Nor Dog (1946), one of the author's scarcest volumes. Kersh's novels Fowlers End and The Great Wash and the short story collections Nightshade and Damnations, On an Odd Note, and Clock Without Hands are also...

'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.' New York Herald Tribune'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

In London under the fog of war, a 10-year-old Jewish girl is murdered. The police have no clues and little interest, so crusader Asta Thundesley takes up the challenge, sifting through clues and gathering up suspects for a dinner party where...nothing is learned. Detective Turpin goes by the book, and finds himself with a stunning set...of dead ends. Fascinating example of life’s perils by author Kersh (Night and the City), who reminds for every winner, there can be a ton of losers.

The discovery of piles of bones seeming to belong to a previously unknown species of monster will help to unfold a macabre and grisly tale. – A lady is found dead in her bed, the apparent victim of a murder the coroner proves could not possibly have occurred. – A merman found by fishermen off the coast of Brighton in 1745 will reveal the truth behind one of the most terrible events of the 20th century. – A desperate man makes an ill-advised bargain with a man in black – An extraordinarily horrible dummy exercises a frightful control over his terrified ventriloquist – A condemned murderer lives again through the eyes of an innocent child . . .   These are the plots of just a few of the brilliant tales you will find in this volume as you enter the bizarre world of master storyteller Gerald Kersh. With a focus on Kersh's science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories, On an Odd Note (1958) contains thirteen of his best. This first-ever reprint...