London Noir

INTRODUCTION

Like so many of the great cities of the world, London is many things to different people.

For those from abroad and tourists, it conveys images of tarnished royal splendours, faded imperial monuments, the tawdry glamour of Soho and Piccadilly Circus. For the more historically-minded amongst them, visions are conjured of Victorian fog and dread and square-shaped East End gangsters, while for others London is just a gentle panorama of terraced houses with tiled roofs and front gardens in suburbia.

For those who live there, London is alternately a quiet, often boring sprawl of a megalopolis with its myriad villages, parks and greenery, or in the grey light of day, a sordid capital where misery and poverty are inescapable.

While for lovers, London can be a graveyard of sweet memories.

For me, London, a city where I was born but did not return to until my mid-twenties, has a thousand varied faces: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, St Paul’s and the City on which I had to do a book during my publishing years, Camden Town and its increasingly bizarre markets, the hills of Hampstead, the genteel bohemia of Notting Hill and Islington, tennis at Wimbledon, the colour of the Thames near Richmond Bridge, football stadia in Tottenham and Highbury and cricket pitches at the Oval and Lord’s, the unending ascent of the Finchley Road where I had my first London flat, the late Scala cinema near King’s Cross, the West Indian accents in Brixton, pretty women in Clapham and Blackheath, Orthodox Jewish kids ambling down the Golders Green Road with their anachronistic locks, cavernous Victoria Station’s gateways to the South, and so much more.

But then, for you the reader of this anthology, London will mean many other things, all different.

And you there, yes, you the wondrous tall lady standing quietly at the back with her mass of tangled hair, London might well be another set of images and memories altogether. Hotel rooms near Heathrow or West End basements maybe?

I suppose that’s the way of fascinating cities, to grip, charm and inspire us.

Somehow, most noir writing automatically brings America and its legendary dark side to mind: the rainy mean streets of night-time California in the pages of Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy’s hell-pit of Los Angeles, mafia hoods in New York’s Little Italy, countless road movies or gangster flicks full of fury and despair. But London also enjoys its share of gloom, doom and heart-break. Here, people live, suffer and love in their own idiosyncratic ways too. Think of such eminent London writers as Gerald Kersh, Patrick Hamilton, a certain Dickens and, today, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Derek Raymond.

Well, Whitechapel did spawn Jack the Ripper Esquire after all!

So I thought I would ask several friends and writers each to pen a new story about the darkness they saw at the heart of our contradictory city. The responses, collected here, are both varied and fascinating, and provide us with a patchwork portrait of a London we never knew, a dark London, a London Noir.

Often a very bleak view, I am aware, but then urban nightmares must always have a silver lining, and lancing a boil can have beneficial effects in the long run.

London, this is your other life.

Maxim Jakubowski