I set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 23 in the series.
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Dominic Nolan’s knotty crime novel, published three years ago, is largely set in the Soho of the capital’s pre-war, Oswald Mosley era, a place where the exploitation school of criminality and an outsider form of social liberalism helped each other get along, knife-in-back and hand-in-hand. When it wasn’t joining in, the Met mostly just looked on, though now and then it made an effort to stitch someone up when the headlines got embarrassing.
The story’s principal anti-hero, Leon Geats, is a bent-for-the-job kind of cop of Irish-Jewish descent with an intimate knowledge of Soho’s moody, cosmopolitan backstreets, nefarious operators and goings-on, and a low opinion of the police hierarchy and higher profile units.
His closest colleagues are Billie Massey and Mark Cassar who, as we learn in the first pages, marry, although there’s a bit more to it than that. We are told at the same time that Geats comes to a sticky end, though there’s a bit more to that too.
The book is, therefore, substantially a backstory of skullduggery and surprise revelations, shuttling between eras up to and including the Noughties and all tied to the pursuit of a serial killer. It has a complicated cast of crooks and semi-crooks, some of them semi-honourable, some of them in uniform.
Critics have praised Vine Street’s evocation of the capital’s disreputable and melancholic side. Here’s an example:
“A few loiterers, cigarettes gummed to their lips, bristled when Geats swanned through the Yard. He stopped off at his mother’s flat. Clara was awake and had been listening to tangos and foxtrots on shellac discs that had found their way to Britain from the east on the wave of the diaspora. The gramophone had wound itself out and she stared inscrutably at its silence.”
I like this snapshot of London during the war:
“Temple was on fire again, as it seemed to have been since the autumn. What was London? It wasn’t quite a battlefield, though it looked like one. Armies didn’t clash there, but death was dropped from above, and the only thing it didn’t alter was the Thames, the great pulsating artery keeping the city alive.”
He means its waters were required for putting out fires.
The novel is introduced as being “based on a somewhat true story” and a couple of real life characters appear in the form of cameos by two of the famous Mitford sisters, the notorious fascists Diana and Unity, whose tastes also embraced hanging out in Soho jazz dives. One of our encounters with them occurs during a violent British Union of Fascists rally in Leicester Square:
“Elegantly dressed women who had been marching with the Union paused to lament the bloodshed, and Geats found himself face to face with two he recognised: the dancing sisters with the aristocratic noses whose escape from Chez Renée’s he had facilitated through the tunnel.”
The pair also supply a link in Nolan’s intricate plot chain.
Vine Street’s title is, of course, the name of the West End street best known for appearing on the original Monopoly board. In the novel, it the location of Geats’s local Met station. This is another clear link to London history: Vine Street police station had 18th Century foundations and by the middle of the 19th it was one of the busiest cop shops in the world. In 1928, an officer working there was sacked after it emerged he’d amassed a small fortune gathering bribes from local clubs and brothels. The station closed in 1940. Dominic Nolan has put it back on London’s map.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.