10 Duffy (1980)
Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year as Barnes’s debut novel proper, Metroland, but where that took seven years to write, this took 10 days. Not that it shows: this “refreshingly nasty” (as Barnes’s friend Martin Amis put it) crime caper is beguilingly well written, with passages that display all of Barnes’s perception and wit. The plot of reverse blackmail and the shocking climax only add to the fun.
Sample line “Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away.”
9 The Porcupine (1992)
Barnes’s shortest novel is a satire of the personalities in a collapsed European communist regime. Former leader Petkanov is to have a televised trial. He believes he did nothing wrong – “They loved me” – and despises Gorbachev’s western-friendliness, “sucking Reagan’s dick and then sucking Bush’s”.
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