I've met Phil Lecomber, with whom I share an agent, a number of times over the past year or so. I enjoy his company, and asked him to talk about the background to his books. Here's his guest post:
'For inspiration for my
Golden Age crime series, Piccadilly Noir, I turned to a collection of
books with a distinctly local provenance. After all, unlike the American milieu
of Raymond Chandler, my protagonist, George Harley, inhabits a peculiarly
British world – one of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, and Gold Flake
cigarettes.
To establish the base flavour, I began with some classic London aromatics. Dickens, of course – particularly in his Sketches by Boz phase; Thomas Burke, whose problematic racial stereotypes might now obscure his otherwise fascinating depictions of the city; and that great biographer of London, Peter Ackroyd.
To bring out the interwar period flavour, I turned to Patrick Hamilton, whose novels – with their petrichor of disappointment and cast of troubled lodgers – provided a rich stock for my world-building. I added further depth with some more obscure works, including Storm Jameson’s Here Comes a Candle, Philip Allingham’s Cheapjack, and Hippo Neville’s glorious Sneak-Thief on the Road.
Now to the meat of the stew: the works of the great Gerald Kersh – chiefly Night and the City, but also Fowler’s End, Prelude to a Certain Midnight, and The Angel and the Cuckoo. Now sadly mostly forgotten, Kersh was once among Britain’s highest-paid writers, living a life as colourful as his characters. A blend of Night and the City and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was exactly the flavour I was aiming for when I first began creating Harley’s world.
For a little extra spice, I turned to a handful of gritty 1930s novels, including James Curtis’s The Gilt Kid; Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work; and Grierson Dickson’s Soho Racket. And so, I believed, I had arrived at the perfect recipe for a hard-boiled British noir series.'
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