Books like Yardie

20 or so years ago, Will Self curated a feature in The Observer which listed 20-30 notable cult novels. Among these, established classics such as A Clockwork Orange , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Trainspotting rubbed shoulders with less famous offerings and Victor Headley's book counted among these.The copy I finally managed to obtain was a second hand one, the book having been out of print for a number of years, and was stamped as 'withdrawn' from the library of a South London school - not surprisingly given that it's a tale with enough freebase Ecuadorian marching powder, casual sexual disloyalty and gangster violence to make even the hardiest of us quail.But to consign this to 'cult' status would be quite wrong because there is something really impressive here - the use of Jamaican patois, regular nods to that island country's musical heritage, portrait of Hackney before the Nathan Barleys arrived and insistent narrative provide a punchy, 185 novel with a not an ounce of fat on it. More books in the Yardie series were to follow and this one leaves much unresolved but in 'D.', there is an immoral hero to foreshadow other villains of gangster fiction and celluloid. A TV series based on the book and its sequels would be something to savour.It's also a great snapshot of the early 1990s and testament to Dotun Adebayo's foundation of the X Press, devoted to highlighting Black culture.