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Cookie spent so long talking about his book that there wasn’t time for him to actually read from it. Many of those present got completely smashed – it was a top night precisely because those who were there remember very little of it! I went to many events at Compendium but the most memorable (aside from my own, of course) was a Robin Cook (AKA Derek Raymond) reading. I mentioned 100 Pipers whiskey repeatedly in the book, and so the company very kindly sent along a couple of crates. The best event I had at Compendium was the publication party for my first novel Pure Mania in 1989. When I started getting books published, Mike put them in the window…. He’d also introduce me to countercultural figures like Jeff Nuttall whenever I happened to be in the shop at the same time as them. Mike would find cheap English language editions of books by writers he felt I should have read, and offer to order them for me.

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He always discounted the books I bought and often got me free copies of records I wanted from his innumerable contacts in the music business.īy the time I became acquainted with Mike I’d already read plenty of dada, surrealist, nouveau roman and beat literature – but he got me checking out the likes of Boris Vian and Jim Thompson.

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Mike was the last in a series of older friends who turned me on to new authors when I was still young relatively young – and like a good number of those who preceded him, he’d been to art school.

He didn’t have a lot of time for the kids who came into the store solely to buy copies of On The Road. I was 14 years younger than Mike and about 15 years after we met, he told me he knew I was okay when he started at the shop because I was into William Burroughs novels rather than Jack Kerouac books (this was of course before interest in Burroughs soared from the late-eighties onwards). Mike ran the fiction and poetry section from the early 1980s until the store closed just over a decade ago now. The first person I got to know well at Compendium was Mike Hart. With his death, the literary world lost a sweet and genuinely unselfish man who freely gave of his vast knowledge and delighted in the achievements of those he influenced so profoundly.Compendium Books in Camden Town opened in August 1968 but I didn’t start visiting the shop until the end of the seventies.

Mike moved to the independent crime specialists Murder One. Visiting Americans, from old beat heroes like Lawrence Ferlinghetti to new literary lions like Walter Mosley, read there so too did the London writers Iain Sinclair, Martin Millar and Derek Raymond.īy the end of the 1990s, Camden Town was thoroughly commercialised, its last remaining outposts of bohemianism swamped by endless leather jacket stores, and it was with a sense of bowing to the inevitable that Compendium closed its doors. Mike formalised its literary scene by initiating regular readings in the bookshop, something of an innovation at the time. He combined working on building sites with running a Camden Market stall, before Compendium in 1982.Īs the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Camden became a magnet for the world's teenagers and Compendium underwent a facelift. They split up in the late 1970s, but he maintained a close relationship with his son. He did odd jobs and then took a history degree at North London Polytechnic, where he met his wife Angela. After local schools he went on to Glasgow Art School, before moving to London in the early 1970s. There you would find Mike at the heart of a group of autodidacts, musicians, writers, lowlifes and drunks whose house band was the Pogues and whose cultural heroes were Jim Thompson, Hank Williams, Tom Raworth and Little Willie John.Ī GP's son, born in Clydebank, Glasgow, Mike was the eldest of four children. Thanks to Mike, and others, Camden Town in the 1980s became a kind of counter-cultural nexus: a place where you could drift from record shop to caff to Compendium and thence to the pub. The shop became the haunt of an unlikely mixture of more or less literary luminaries, from Nick Cave to Ben Okri, Ivor Cutler to Kathy Acker. To walk into Compendium, survey the novels on display and ask Mike's advice was to enter a new world of fiction.

If these writers have emerged from the margins to become major players in the literary landscape it is in no small part due to Mike's efforts. A new Scottish writer called James Kelman was also a favourite, as was the great African-American writer Chester Himes. His enthusiasms included then unheralded American thriller writers such as Elmore Leonard and George V Higgins London writers from the forgotten Patrick Hamilton to the unknown Iain Sinclair. When Mike took over the department in the early 1980s, British fiction was in a dismal, class-bound rut.

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