Terri's Tales — Russell James

From one of Britain's masters of crime writing, here are two stories to whet your appetite, presented here in bargain-price format. The first, A Piece of Cake, has been anthologised several times already, and tells of the night Terri waited at home for her current lover, the no-good Jeg, to return from his latest robbery. The job had gone wrong, and Jeg is not in a good mood. In the second story, No Debts Unpaid, Terri has moved on. Working as a hostess in a south London bar, she is pressured into picking up and duping a more likeable young criminal, Billy Nolan. Terri is a girl with a conscience â€" but it will be a violent night, and unhappy for some.
These are early stories from the years when Russell James was establishing himself as ‘one of the best of Britain's darker crime writers' (as the Times called him). They tell of the young woman Terri and her hard-scrabble existence in south London among criminals and hard types.