The cover of Mike Thomas’s debut novel , Pocket Notebook, is a reworking of the original cover of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, only the heavily lashed, wide-open, one-eyed face belongs not to a brawling offender in braces but to a policeman in full uniform. The contrast is intentional: the protagonist of Pocket Notebook is indeed a police officer. However, like his Clockwork Orange parallel, he is also a violent thug.
This would be a risky topic for most writers. Bent coppers receive their share of attention in movies, but in a novel where detail isn’t so easily skimmed over, isn’t it tricky terrain for a writer not versed in police work? It would be, but Mike Thomas is a serving policeman as well as a writer.
And it shows. Pocket Notebook is extremely authentic in its use of police jargon and routine. A small, preconceived idea-hoarding part of me protested before I read the book that a novel written by a policeman might not be very well written because he’d be too busy being a copper to write. However, that’s not the case (and what a feeble prejudice that is in any case, considering the wide variety of professionals who are also stellar writers). His novel is sharp, funny, black and strikingly written.
The story centres around the life of Jacob Smith, a thirty seven year-old tactical firearms officer. Jake starts off the novel in his prime. He is popular, has a best buddy and partner Frank who loves him like a brother, he is tall (a towering 6’5”) and built like a bull, and he has a wife and two children. But Jake is out of control. His fanaticism for body building has led to an addiction to testosterone injections. His liberal use of these illicit drugs has landed him in deep debt. Meanwhile the testosterone has precipitated aggressive behaviour which has crossed the line into violence. Jake now routinely takes his belligerence out on those rounded up for petty offences. And his colleagues are starting to notice.
Coincident with this, the surging male hormones have also caused Jake’s libido to surge out of control. He had an ill-advised fling with a junior female police officer and has also developed the hots for Frank’s teenage daughter Jessica. There is a darkness in Jake’s past regarding his parents that he is pushing into his subconscious but it keeps bobbing out and threatening to overwhelm him.
Pocket Notebook is the story of Jake’s life spiralling out of control. He gradually loses everything he loves – his wife and children, his job in firearms and even his devoted best mate Frank. He becomes an explosive, unpredictable psychotic, as amoral and violent as any of the worst criminals he’s previously detained.
Unlike A Clockwork Orange, there is no ’cure’ for violence here. We just read the account of Jake’s downfall, illustrated by pages from his pocket notebook at work, which metamophosises from a formal list of his work duties to a stream-of-consciousness diary of his anger and frustration.
Thomas’s experience as a police officer is very apparent: the copper slang and vernacular – for example ’Trumpton’s wagon’, ‘hose monkeys’ and ‘water fairies’ for fire engines/firemen and ’blues and twos’ for police sirens - come across as genuine and are casually dropped into Jake’s feverish first-person narrative and not forced. Thomas also reveals shocking unofficial police tactics. For instance ’black dogging’ is a form of police revenge on particularly abusive and violent prisoners taken into the police van: after locking the prisoner in the cage at the back of the van, the police officer driving the van accelerates to a high speed and then suddenly slams the brakes on, allegedly due to an (imaginary) dog in the road, hurling the prisoner about in the cage and giving him/her bruises. There is also the matter-of-fact mention of the need for Jake and his fellow officers on an arrest to ‘get our heads together back at the nick and make sure everyone’s pocket notebook entries tallied.’
Thomas is also honest about the problems in policing such as the understaffing, where young, inexperienced officers are left in charge of large units overnight, although everything is described not as you’d see it reported in an earnest broadsheet but as seen through Jake’s sneering, extremely cynical gaze. In this regard it’s almost like Cardiac Arrest or Bodies (Jed Mercurio’s medical dramas) as applied to the police force – showing the gritty reality in an astonishingly frank and often jarring way.
The unapologetically un PC view of Jake’s allows Thomas to describe the less salubrious encounters a policeman has without the filter of diplomacy. Here he is on the Magistrates’ Court corridors:
‘It’s an animal pen. They wait for you, clumped in groups on stairwells, near the toilets, outside the very court they’re about to appear in. They bring their friends, their families. Despite the draconian ban, the air is thick with smoke. Soggy roll-ups, or if they’re flush it’s Lambert and Butler, the underclass’s pre-rolled cigarette of choice. It’s a blur of hoodies and cheap Asda trainers on cream tiles. These Burberry fools. These walking abortions. The aroma is fags, sweat and stale lager-breath from their pre-court piss-up. You walk past, uniform pressed, eyes fixed on somewhere ahead but not really looking, pretending to ignore them when they tell you what they plan to do to your wife and children. How they hope your father dies of cancer, you fuckin’ truffle-snuffler. That they’re going to rape your mother as soon as they’re finished in this joke shop of a building.’
Jake’s casual violence is shocking yet plausible. He refers to the young officer working with his ex-girlfriend as FNG – Fucking New Guy – and says he previously referred to him as Seal Pup because he wanted to ‘club him to death.’ His urge to have sex with so many women he comes across without consideration of the consequences makes him comparable to Nick Cave’s recent amoral anti-hero Bunny Munro – certainly both men seem to have been screwed up by their fathers, are out of touch with their emotions and are on self-destructive spirals leading to their downfall.
Yet for all the marauding maleness of the action, the pugnacious brawls and Jake’s bursting libido, there are very funny parts to Pocket Notebook. Thomas manages to capture domestic detail sympathetically, both with regard to Jake and his wife Karen and Frank and his wife Mel, who is deeply irritated by Jake. Here is Thomas making Jake’s wife’s huff amusing:
‘I’m in trouble. I sense it immediately. Karen’s stomping around the bedroom in her slippers, refolding already neat clothes.Picking up jeans I wore last night.Kicking my shoes under the bed. Cleaning. Arranging. She does this when she’s angry. After an argument she can sterilise the entire kitchen in an hour.’
And when Jake addresses his ex-girlfriend in front of the FNG, he reports ‘I note with satisfaction his Adam’s apple is pistoning.’
There are also light moments related to Jake’s predilection for women’s feet – podophilia. His reaction when he sees Frank’s wife Mel’s feet is described like so:
‘Mel’s feet are bare but she’s got bunions and freakishly long little toes; I have to clamp my teeth together and swallow as my mouth floods with saliva. How Frank can even be with this woman is beyond me. It’s all I can do not to retch.’
There are also sly witty touches - Jake uses the collective noun ‘a pointlessness’ for a gaggle of police community support officers, for example. In fact, Jake’s sense of humour makes him almost endearing – he describes his female superior as having a face that’s ‘peculiarly flat, like a dog that’s spent too much time chasing parked cars’, and likens his puppyish new partner’s ’constant wittering’ to ‘someone gouging my eardrums with toothpicks’. It’s when his violence and sexual urges escalate that he transforms from a lovable rogue to a frightening figure.
Even when Jake finally flips, there are some blackly comic moments: when he’s suspended, he dons full uniform and patrols the streets:
’…pootling along nicely, feeling pretty mellow now, stopping to exchange pleasantries with some of the old grippers out shopping for condensed milk and cat litter. ‘What’s the time, officer?’ they ask over and over until I’m telling them – nicely, of course, got to stay a pro – to buy a bloody watch.’
And I laughed out loud when Jake entered an internet cafe and arrests a young university student for ‘being Muslim without due care and attention.’ Shades of the Not The Nine O’clock News sketch where Griff Rhys Jones’s Officer Savage is chastised by his superior Rowan Atkinson for arresting someone on the basis of ’possession of curly black hair and thick lips.’
The ending is again similar to The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave ( coincidentally so, since both books were being written at the same time.) The first-person narration leaves a slight problem of ‘how is this story being narrated if what we think happened happened?’ But then, maybe Jake survived and lived to tell the tale. Even if he didn’t, this is a minor hiccup in a wickedly funny yet disturbing book about a policeman having a breakdown. Mike Thomas is a real talent, and his credentials as a working police officer with a sharp eye and a scathing but raucously funny voice make him pretty much unique.
