The Long Firm meets The Big Sleep in this dark thriller set in 1920s Soho.
George Harley is a cockney private detective in late 1920s London. While investigating a series of grisly murders, he uncovers a trail of hidden clues that link the crimes to an infamous figure from the past. Convinced the police have the wrong man, Harley must use all his skills to negotiate the dark underbelly of the city and track down the real killer. The investigation leads to a clash with an occult mastermind, an encounter which will have dire consequences for the rest of his life.
Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from the English country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Its working-class hero does his “sherlocking” in the frowsy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho—the city’s underbelly, peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers and East End mobsters. It’s a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes. Unlike the American noir of Chandler and Hammett, this is a strictly British affair, where the villains are more likely to be wielding cutthroat razors than Tommy guns, and the wise-cracking Lauren Bacalls are louche bohemians with belladonna eyes and ladders in their stockings.
The midnight streets are black as pitch and Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the mustard-yellow smog and the sins are as dark and bitter as stout porter beer.
