Desmond Barry - London Noir

What you have in your hands is not a collection of crime stories set in London. This is rather a collection of crime stories that are London. The things that happen within these pages would not be unfamiliar to those who have come before to render the city’s psyche in words, art, music, theater, or magic. It’s not that this was the city of William Blake, Charles Dickens, Dr. Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Dafoe, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Joe Strummer, or Johnny Rotten. It’s that it still very much is.

London needs illumination from its own darkness, from its perpetual cycle of crimes. This is also the city of Newgate Prison, Bedlam, Amen Corner, Tyburn Cross, the London Monster, Spring-heeled Jack, Jack the Ripper, Jack the Hat, the Blind Beggar, the Baltic Exchange, and 10 Rillington Place. The most famous detective in the world, Sherlock Holmes, stepped out of the smog of a London night, shouted, “The game’s afoot!” and conspired to send his creator Arthur Conan Doyle, along with every actor who tried to make him flesh, mad.

London always extracts its price.

The keys to the city are contained in a line you’ll find in Patrick McCabe’s story “Who Do You Know in Heaven?” “Consciousness,” his know-it-all café-owner spouts, “prompts you to hypothesize that the story you’re creating from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a consistent narrative voice...”

London’s stories seep out of its walls, rise up from the foundations laid by the Romans two thousand years ago, up through its sewers, buried rivers, and tube tunnels, and out through the pavements. They wind their way through twisting alleyways that formed themselves so long ago, before the order of the grid system could be placed upon them. They whisper their secrets through the marketplaces where every language on earth is and has been spoken; every measure of trade haggled over, from fruit and veg to children’s lives. They drift up at night from the currents of Old Father Thames, through the temples of commerce that form the Square Mile, across the halls of Parliament, the Cathedrals laid by Norman kings, the tunnels dug by Victorian engineers.

Listen to London for long enough and the city will impart in you your own notion; your own form of navigation through the maps laid down over centuries; your own heart’s topography of the metropolis. Your soul blends with the walls and pavements, the tunnels and spires, the street markets and the stock exchanges. But is that notion really your own, or has the suggestion been planted, the story already written long ago?

The stories in this collection form maps of the city you will not find in the A-Z. Already, the city has exerted its collective subconscious over this creation without the authors being aware of it, so that the bohemian West, the iconic East, the melancholy North, and the wild South are linked. By lines of songs from the same jukebox; angles in the heads of priests, coppers, witchdoctors, lawyers, pornographers, psychopaths, con men, and terrorists; even the trajectory of a skein of wild geese.

Every kind of crime has been committed here; most of them never solved. London is responsible for all of them. London confuses the mind: Pat McCabe’s IRA man comes to the mainland on a mission and gets seduced by a black-and-white photo of a London only felt in his blood, of a haunted ’40s dancehall. Jerry Sykes’s lonely pensioner dreams of ’50s Camden Town even as he is mugged by its twenty-first-century offspring. Sylvie Simmons’s psychiatrist talks to a ventriloquist’s doll. Joe McNally sees London’s ectoplasm form into grotesque, mythological shapes as he traverses the labyrinth of Elephant & Castle.

Some can see through the veils more clearly than others. For Joolz Denby, the Great Wen is an even Greater Con, a gray eternity without a soul, beckoning you into its clip-joint belly for more addictions you can never beat, more itches you can never scratch. For Barry Adamson’s Father Donaghue, the Maida Hill community of losers and bruisers he serves are all souls worth fighting for, so that he may even redeem his own. But for Stewart Home’s dead-eyed policeman, the souls of the neighboring parish of Ladbroke Grove are mere commodities, investments for his pension scheme.

London favors the entrepreneur. London thrives on the violence it incites. London built its Parliament on a bramble-riddled mire known as Thorney Island a thousand years ago. It is policed by villains, ministered to by the damned, carved up by Masonic market traders.

London’s perennial themes rise to the surface in relentless waves. Martyn Waites stirs up the mob mentality in the mean estates of Dagenham, the traditional dumping ground of the city’s poor, manipulated and united by self-destructive hatred. Daniel Bennett places a Ripper in Hackney’s Clissold Park, just slightly north of his old stomping grounds. The city’s most infamous bogeyman takes on a new shape here, no longer an eminent Victorian surgeon or the wayward offspring of the Queen but a disturbed adolescent, pulsing with the red rage of the city’s demented heat. Mark Pilkington gets down among the traders of lost souls to record human trafficking and child sacrifice in Dalston, where John Dee reincarnates himself as a Nigerian sangoma, in the opposite end of the city from where he started in the reign of Elizabeth I. Michael Ward reminds us of the Establishment, those bewigged members of the Temple, and the closet of the Cabinet: They Who Are Really Pulling the Strings, and always have been.

London’s Burning, London Calling, Waterloo Sunset, the Guns of Brixton. London pulses to the music of the world, each district retelling its own folk legends through bhangra, reggae, ska, blues, jazz, fado, flamenco, electronica, hip hop, punk — pick your own soundtrack. John Williams’s ageing punk rocker finds the man he could have been, lying wasted and dribbling at a gig in a New Cross bar. Like the lines from a song, the past comes back to haunt Desmond Barry’s would-be filmmaker, through a wormhole in time and out in the middle of Soho.

London is a siren, calling you to the rocks of your own destruction, taunting and teasing and offering you a flash of its flesh as you teeter drunkenly in the doorway. Ken Bruen’s gangster finds her on a Brixton dancefloor. My own creation, private eye Dougie, tries to spirit her out of the city through the portal of King’s Cross.

That London has survived so long comes down to its foundation in the root of all evil. The river, as the Romans knew, meant the riches of the world could be shipped directly to its ravenous mouth. London has controlled the world for many of the years of its existence. London is the Grand Wizard. It’s no coincidence that Ken Hollings writes a future projection for the city from the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf, the monument to capitalism laid down on the ashes of the working class East End by the Wicked Witch of Westminster, Margaret Thatcher.

So again, this is not really a collection of crime stories. This is a compass for the reader to chart their own path through the dark streets of London, to take whatever part chimes most closely with their soul and use it as a talisman.

London is shadows and fog. London is haunted. London is the definitive noir.

Cathi Unsworth

May 2006

London