nogoodnik

As I listened to the lyrics, I thought the nogoodnik being sung about was a debtor, among other things.

Nogoodnik Stanley Subbers (0liver Chris, as tall as a beanpole but with a smaller brain) has murdered Roscoe, the dodgy fiance of dimwit Pauline Clinch (Claire tams), of whom her own father Charlie "The Duck" Clinch (Fred Ridgeway) remarks: "They've tried but they can't make bricks thicker."

Maybe so, if you were a religion Zionist or a secular nationalist or a sentimentalist or a fundamentalist, but if you were just a Jewish leydigeyer in America, an out-of-work nogoodnik with a nagging wife who didn't work either, and you fancied yourself a writer who over two dozen years had published at the most four poems and three short stories in two magazines printed by your own friends that even your own mother didn't read, then there should have been other things to cry about besides the dispersion and the assimilation of your hapless people.

The protagonist, Danny Williams, an up-from-the-vaguely-mean-but-very-Protestant streets of Northern Ireland, tries to survive both a Magic Circle (18) London law firm and the nogoodnik loyalist circles into which some of his childhood acquaintances have drifted.