The Contenders

John Wain has a crisp and refreshing writing style, it is simple but incisive. His wit is sharp. His descriptions of people, places and situations are almost cinematic, they conjure up the black and white "kitchen sink" films of the early sixties.The Contenders is a study of rivalry between an artist and a businessman, in between this study you have the narrator who knows them both as friends. He discovers that their modus operandi is to beat the other in some massive psychological game. In a way, it is a tragic but very funny study of the human condition.

Wain says he can't name the town - it's really a city (or six towns) - but it is obviously Stoke-on-Trent.