As jumping between forms can be tricky, it’s wise for authors to attempt it first on familiar material. With his debut novel, The Dead Don’t Bleed, poet Neil Rollinson does just that. The most striking feature of the four books of poetry that have won him acclaim and a Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award is the veering between keen responsiveness to life’s pleasures and an acute awareness of mortality. Another trait is the contrast between the blazing vibrancy of southern Spain – which regularly ignites Rollinson’s imagination – and the industrial dereliction of his native northeast England. These qualities are also particular to The Dead Don’t Bleed, the recipient of the Deborah Rogers Award in 2023 for unpublished prose writing.

Frank, the central character, is an aspiring author with a notebook full of Lorca-esque poems. He is eager to write fiction but finds that ‘it’s a struggle. He’s hopeless at plot.’ For his part, Rollinson isn’t hopeless at plot but it’s not among his strengths. His novel’s storyline isn’t always plausible and the thriller set-up is a bit shopworn. Frank, it transpires, has driven through Spain to tell his brother, Gordon, whom he hasn’t seen for twenty-five years, that their gangster father has recently died. It should be a source of relief to Gordon, who had fled with loot from a hijacking that went badly wrong and feared his father’s vengeance. But, instead, it releases long-festering resentments and rivalries.

Now a bull-necked, beer-bellied failure slathering barbecued sausages with Colman’s English mustard on a patio under a limp St George’s flag, Gordon seethes with animosity towards Frank, his cleverer older brother who has pulled clear of the family’s Tyneside crime empire. Frank has reasons of his own for bitterness. Tensions