Paparazzo

Terrence Crake has worked the London patch since 1979 — doorsteps, hospital car parks, school gates, coroners' courts. He is sixty-four years old and very good indeed at a job nobody respects, which suits him, because nobody guards themselves against a man they have already written off. He prices a morning by eight o'clock. He does not price a job twice. He keeps thirty-one ruled books of every frame he has ever sold, dated and priced and as dull as a tide table.

He is also, by his own reckoning, having the best year of his life. Every tip lands. He is in the right street four times a week. Something is going wrong in London at a rate he has never known, and Terry Crake is standing in the middle of it with a camera, invoicing.

When Ray Vessey dies — forty years on the same patch, same courts, same wet pavements — Crake drives to Sidcup and buys the man's entire archive off his widow for eighty pounds. Stock, bought cheap. That is all it is.

In carton eleven, on a contact sheet dated the eighth of November 1966, fifteen people stand outside a magistrates' court at Camberwell Green. Nine of them face the door. At the edge of frame ten is a man of about sixty-four, three-quarters turned away, hands down, dark coat, no hat.

It is him.

What follows is the only investigation Terry Crake has ever run into himself, and he runs it exactly as he would run it on anybody else: methodically, cheaply, and entirely without wonder. A relative. A lookalike. A hoax. Shot after and dressed up. The plate doctored. Five answers, and he takes them apart one at a time, in a darkroom on Bevenden Street and on a freezer lid in a railway arch, until there are none left standing.

Then he goes into his own archive. Eleven thousand contact sheets. Nine days at ten hours a day, a loupe and a pencil and a flask, thirty seconds a sheet.

And the thing he finds there is not that he does not age.

It is that for fifty years he has been standing next to the same three strangers. Every single time, in every frame, it was somebody's worst day.

Terry Crake is an antihero of a rarer sort than the usual. The standard model is reluctant — and reluctance is still a heroic posture, because a man who does not want the job understands he has been offered it. Crake is not reluctant. He is superlatively good at work nobody respects, he is very funny about it, and he is having the time of his life.

Paparazzo is the first novel in Weights and Measures — a five-book sequence in which each volume re-reads the one before it from an irreconcilable point of view.

The series takes its name from the language of trading standards and market inspectors: a municipal, entirely innocuous phrase for the business of converting human lives into comparable units. It states everything and gives away nothing.

This is a book about a genuinely repellent man who is the best in London at his job — and about the reader who spends four hundred pages willing him to get the shot.