O, HITMAN, MY HITMAN !

In her multi-faceted book, Eleanor Berry describes the life of a feisty gypsy woman, raised in a filthy discarded railway carriage, before her escape to London.

Her extraordinary adventures unravel themselves throughout the book, including her deeply moving conversion to Judaism.

We are introduced to such characters as Goliath Baskerville, the circus dwarf, the saintly Dr Alan Wiseman, the nihilistic, vicious, permanently inebriated Sean Rand and lastly Charlie Elliot with whom she finds eventual happiness.

"Eleanor Berry's volatile pen is at it again. This time, she takes her readers back to the humorously eccentric Harley Street community. She also introduces Romany gypsies and travelling circuses, a trait she has inherited from her self-confessed gypsy aunt, the late writer, Eleanor Smith, after whom she was named."

"Like Smith, Berry is an inimitable and delightfully natural writer."

- Kev Adlard. Johannesburg Evening Sketch

RRP: £6.95 (UK)

ISBN: 0 7223 3065-0

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Excerpt from O'Hitman, My Hitman!

Outside a rough public house called The Shakespeare in Bromley-by-Bow, two men stood gesticulating in hostile verbal combat.

Both were shouting abnormally loudly in order to be heard in the perilous 120mph gale for which October 1987 is famous.

The Shakespeare specialized almost exclusively in the sale of hard drugs. Brawney salesmen, who tended on the whole to be black, stood confidently outside the building and openly sold heroin, cocaine and chalky hunks of crack.

The Shakespeare was never visited by the police, so terrifying and deadly were these salesmen, one of whom had once slit a policeman's throat.

One of the shouting men was 45 and 5' 10" tall with thick, wavy, blond hair blowing over his face in the savage wind. His physique was well-exercised and muscular and his large, drug-tarnished blue eyes, once likened by his mother to a Caribbean sky, were staring and manic with demented rage. His verbal delivery was articulate and his accent, though educated, was neither attributable to region nor class.

He wore a track suit, which he kept brushing nervously, and training shoes. It was clear from his general comportment that he was unused to wearing such garments, which suggested that he was more accustomed to the formal city clothing of a businessman or a doctor.

A doctor's bag, containing medical equipment as well as a flick knife and a cosh, lay at his feet ready to be opened when necessary. On the inside of the bag facing him were the initials A.W. in bold copperplate letters, and just inside the bag was an engraved card giving his name and address: Dr Alan Wiseman, 71 Harley Street.

The doctor's opponent was less physically endowed. He was only 5' 4" tall but well built enough to afford to be aggressive. His face was somewhat Hispanic-looking with greasy, slicked-back hair, an unprepossessing, broken Roman nose and tiny, mean black eyes. He wore ill-fitting brown trousers, a tight army sweater and soiled training shoes. He too had a flick knife which he gripped tightly in his left hand.

Only parts of the conversation between the two men were audible in the gale.

"I could cut off your smack, man. What then?" said the thug.

"That's not the point. I could get that anywhere. I'm here because you assaulted my wife, Cassie."

The thug took a tighter grip on his flick knife and edged closer to the doctor.

"It weren't assault. Bloody asking for it, she were. Not a very nice kind of girl. I wanted to slit her up the middle but I didn't."

"Button your lip, laddie or I'll sort you Kraywise!" snarled the doctor.

The doctor's hand turned into a fist. He pounded his adversary in the stomach, winding him. Then he buried his fist in his jaw. The smaller man fell to the ground and curled into a ball as blood spurted from his mouth.

The doctor knelt down and stretched out his hand firmly, keeping his fingers straight. Quite unexpectedly, he swung his outstretched hand into the other man's top teeth in a spectacular, karate-chopping movement which was so violent that it split his skull in half. It was only when he saw part of the brain emerging from the crushed cranium that the doctor felt he had adequately avenged the honour of his wife, the former Cassie Lee.