Playwright Willy Russell has written so much for both stage and screen you'd expect his index fingers to be on crutches by now. Not a chance. His debut novel is a snappy coming-of-age yarn about a youngster like himself growing up in Manchester and telling all by writing letters to Morrissey, the former singer with the Smiths. Whether Morrissey ever actually gets the letters is irrelevant, because for Raymond Marks the issue is about owning to misdemeanors, expulsion from school, bad thoughts, wicked ways, the pursuit of the nice person he used to be. It's a clever book about the woes of being a young 'un with the slightly saucy mind of someone who is good at listening in to his elders. Russell has managed to write with the mind of a kid. The one-liners are there, the humour as well as the pathos, the sadness, the sense of despair. Ah, Shirley Valentine sitting on a beach again . . .