Psychokiller: Ep. 5
Liquid Lenny lying in the vat of beer beneath a block of council flats is as chilling as Freddie Kruger in his boiler room.
EPISODE FIVE Pages 33-40
Once again I’m in awe of the wild angles Dave uses, culminating in ‘It’s Boogie Time Baby!’
The visual contrast of Mary Anne as a beehive-sporting, 1950s fan of James Dean to a contemporary young woman and a fan of Metallica is excellent.
Liquid Lenny lying in the vat of beer beneath a block of council flats is as chilling as Freddie Kruger in his boiler room. The cop reminds me of the excellent and hard-face Chris Ellison, who played Inspector Burnside in The Bill and also the gangster Tony Fisher in ITV’s Widows. Perfect for the time the story appeared.
The scenes are also colour-coded with great thought and care. The 1950s scenes have a bubblegum-pink quality you would expect from a Valentine card. The horror scenes are dark and menacing. And the sequence where Mary Anne finds her soul again has bright, optimistic colours. We might take such colour-coding for granted but, believe me, many artists struggle with the idea or even resist it.
The poem which inspired Liquid Lenny in Psychokiller came originally from a parody of a sentimental Victorian verse, Little Jim by Edward Farmer:
I have no pain, dear mother, now,
But oh! I am so dry;
Just moisten poor Jim's lips again,
And, mother, don't you cry.
I came across the parody while writing Charley’s War, my saga about the troops in the trenches of World War One.
I have no pain, Dear Mother, now, but, oh, I am so dry : connect me with a brewery and leave me here to die!
This verse must have annoyed the Temperance societies who were a powerful force in the early years of the 20th century.
It was still clearly popular in 1934, when the immortal Donald McGill, the creator of the saucy seaside postcard genre, produced a postcard extolling the pleasures of drinking beer. The illustration (of a man in bed drinking beer through a tube) is signed by 'Donald' and dated 11/34.
I love our dark British sense of humour and I like to think Psychokiller continues in that vein.
Psychokiller is available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback.