London Brakes

Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes - a motorcycle courier on a big bike, picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits - the answer to every question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London town. Set in the 1980s, "London Brakes" shows us an England of conflicting loyalties and low impostures - a city divided by inequality and opportunism: a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life.

John Muckle was born in the village of Cobham, Surrey, but lived most of his adult life in Essex and London. Amongst other things he has been a copywriter, an editor, a lecturer, a careworker, a bookshop assistant, a library assistant, a freelance writer and a motorcycle courier. In the 1980s he initiated the Paladin Poetry Series and was General Editor of its flagship anthology, The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988). His previous books include The Cresta Run (short stories), Cyclomotors (a novella with photographic illustrations), and Firewriting and Other Poems (Shearsman Books, 2005).