Homeless truths

When Alexander Masters first met Stuart Shorter, he was sitting on a heap of cardboard in a Cambridge doorway on Christmas Eve. Masters describes him as having 'pasty skin... broken gym shoes, hair cropped to the scalp, his face... almost Mongoloid. Several... teeth were missing; his mouth was a sluice.'

Shorter was suicidal but for complicated personal reasons he wanted to make his death look like murder, although, as was often the way with him, he had neither wish granted that day.

Instead, that meeting was the start of an unlikely friendship between public school-educated Masters and the poly-drug addicted, psychopathic Shorter, who died in 2002 when he stepped in front of a train.

Stuart: A Life Backwards is one of the most unusual biographies of recent years. It's also likely to prove one of 2005's outstanding debuts.

Masters has written Shorter's story in extremely funny anecdotal circles that descend chronologically through his various spells in prison and the crimes that landed him there, the weeks spent on park benches, the drug and alcohol dependencies, troubled adolescence and various foster homes until finally arriving at the life-defining event that partly, but unsatisfyingly, suggests why Shorter lived the life he did.

Mostly, however it's the story of a friendship that somehow thrived on the clash between enduring class perceptions. 'It's about me watching him watching me,' says Masters.

'I never had this impression of someone looking at me as part of a distinct class before. It had always been the other way round. I learned a lot from him because of that.'

Masters and Shorter's friendship actually blossomed at Cambridge's Wintercomfort day centre, where Masters was working 'not because I was interested in the homeless but because the hours suited me'.

In 1999, its directors, Ruth Wyner and John Brock, were sentenced to five years in prison for 'knowingly allowing' the supply of heroin on the premises. Masters was among those who instantly assembled a campaign to free them; Shorter came to the first meeting.

'He gave this speech that knocked us out,' says Masters, who admits their friendship was only possible because the campaign had now put them on an equal footing. A few months later, when the two were protesting outside Westminster, he decided to write a book about his friend. 'He did all the things that I would want a book to do,' says Masters. 'He made me laugh, made me unhappy, made me think oh my God...'