The Russell group uni gangster (with grade eight piano)

It’s not something I usually ask novelists, but I wonder if Gabriel Krauze still carries a gun. I’m at his friend’s flat on a northwest London council estate, the setting of his Booker prize long-listed debut novel, Who They Was.

Over there is the balcony from which a boy with the street name Chicken jumped to escape a pursuing gunman before being summarily executed trying to crawl away on broken legs. And over there is the flat where the unpromisingly named father of two Not Nice plays with his kids with a MAC-10 machinegun on the kitchen table.

Climbing the grim concrete stairwell I am surprised not to be “G-checked” (questioned, I imagine quite brusquely, to establish my gangster credentials). In fact Krauze says