…insightful…A melancholy tone is only to be expected in a novel about the estrangement of fathers and sons, but Shaw has gone beyond that, creating an elegy for an entire alienated generation.
London, November 1968. Detective Sergeant Breen has a death threat in his inbox and a mutilated body on his hands. The dead man was the wayward son of a rising politician and everywhere Breen turns to investigate, he finds himself obstructed and increasingly alienated. Breen begins to see that the abuse of power is at every level of society. And when his actions endanger those at the top, he becomes their target.
Out in the cold, banished from a corrupt and fracturing system, Breen is finally forced to fight fire with fire. William Shaw paints the real portrait of London's swinging sixties. Authentic, powerful and poignant, The Kings of London reveals the shadow beyond the spotlight and the crimes committed in the name of liberation.
London, November 1968. Detective Sergeant Breen has a death threat in his inbox and a mutilated body on his hands. The dead man was the wayward son of a rising politician and everywhere Breen turns to investigate, he finds himself obstructed and increasingly alienated. Breen begins to see that the abuse of power is at every level of society. And when his actions endanger those at the top, he becomes their target.
Out in the cold, banished from a corrupt and fracturing system, Breen is finally forced to fight fire with fire. William Shaw paints the real portrait of London's swinging sixties. Authentic, powerful and poignant, The Kings of London reveals the shadow beyond the spotlight and the crimes committed in the name of liberation.
![The Kings of London](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Kings of London
Narrated by Cameron Stewart
William ShawUnabridged — 13 hours, 12 minutes
![The Kings of London](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Kings of London
Narrated by Cameron Stewart
William ShawUnabridged — 13 hours, 12 minutes
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Overview
London, November 1968. Detective Sergeant Breen has a death threat in his inbox and a mutilated body on his hands. The dead man was the wayward son of a rising politician and everywhere Breen turns to investigate, he finds himself obstructed and increasingly alienated. Breen begins to see that the abuse of power is at every level of society. And when his actions endanger those at the top, he becomes their target.
Out in the cold, banished from a corrupt and fracturing system, Breen is finally forced to fight fire with fire. William Shaw paints the real portrait of London's swinging sixties. Authentic, powerful and poignant, The Kings of London reveals the shadow beyond the spotlight and the crimes committed in the name of liberation.
Editorial Reviews
11/17/2014
When the burned body of an unidentified man is discovered in a derelict house early in Shaw’s darkly humorous sequel to 2014’s She’s Leaving Home, Det. Sgt. Cathal “Paddy” Breen and Temporary Det. Constable Helen Tozer of Marylebone CID investigate. A second corpse—belonging to Francis Pugh, the son of a prominent politician—is discovered in similar circumstances, but with the skin removed from his limbs. Breen soon becomes drawn into a bohemian and criminal milieu of art dealers, hippies, and drugs. Shaw perfectly captures London in the swinging ’60s with its atmosphere of sexism, where bottom ogling and pinching are commonplace. References to contemporary figures from the Beatles and Donovan to Dennis Hopper and Prime Minister James Callaghan bring the era further to life. Breen and Tozer come across as fallible human beings, not razor-sharp law enforcers, and it’s their relationship—both professional and personal—that makes this a winner. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown. (Jan.)
"Insightful . . . An elegy for an entire alienated generation."—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
"[Breen] is nervy, a true original in his line of work, altogether the most welcome new crime solver in British fiction. . . . You'll never read a better evocation of London circa 1968."—Jack Batten, Toronto Star
"A slow burn . . . Good to the last ember"—Arielle Landau, New York Daily News
"A must read! . . . Shaw's characters are flawed, but never dull. The story moves along at a good clip, with the action building toward a thrilling conclusion."—Philip Zozzaro, San Francisco Book Review
"This critique of the Swinging Sixties is administered by a crackerjack storyteller who adroitly balances likable lead characters, bursts of intense action, and a great ear for office banter that will engage any reader who remembers the era, as well as anyone who has to google 'bell-bottoms.'"—Library Journal (starred)
"A clever caper . . . Shaw has done a very good job indeed of weaving this yarn. . . . Everything here feels authentic.—Brooke Wylie, Examiner.com
"Darkly humorous . . . Shaw perfectly captures London in the swinging 60s . . . Breen and Tozer come across as fallible human beings . . . It's their relationship-both professional and personal-that makes this a winner."—Publishers Weekly
"Shaw skillfully resurrects the 1960s bohemian art scene in London. . . . Shaw improves on this series' strong debut."—Booklist
"Shaw makes the gritty English capital come alive . . . [He] admirably depicts the steep uphill battle for women trying to make a career with the police in the '60s."—Kirkus Reviews
★ 01/01/2015
London 1968. DS Cathal "Paddy" Breen is simply trying to cope in this second entry in a projected trilogy (following She's Leaving Home). The routine investigation surrounding the discovery of the charred remains of a body has been turned over to Paddy. When a second charred corpse is discovered, the autopsy reveals that the skin on its arms and legs had been flayed and the body bled out. The fact that the second victim is the son of a top government minister immediately ups the ante. Paddy is also harassed at both work and at his flat. His colleague, Helen Tozer, who, by virtue of her sex, is forbidden from driving a police vehicle, is considering moving back to her family farm to slop the hogs. Quaint period details abound: orange plastic chairs, green Olivetti typewriters, and "big" new 22" TVs. The good-old-boy networks, sexism, racism, police cover-ups, and the terrible appeal of exercising power, though, seem all too contemporary. VERDICT This critique of the Swinging Sixties is administered by a crackerjack storyteller who adroitly balances likable lead characters, bursts of intense action, and a great ear for office banter that will engage any reader who remembers the era, as well as anyone who has to google "bell-bottoms."—Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO
2014-12-07
Corruption and deception run rampant in 1960s London as a detective struggles to balance a recent loss and a stalled homicide investigation. It's 1968, and London is swinging, as drug use rises dramatically and the bohemian counterculture is everywhere. DS Cathal Breen—known around the station as Paddy because of his Irish heritage—returns to work after the death of his elderly father and is soon called to the scene of a gas explosion that left a charred, unidentified corpse. Temporary DC Helen Tozer—Shaw admirably depicts the steep uphill battle for women trying to make a career with the police in the '60s—assists Breen, accompanying him to a second mysterious fire. The victim there is Francis Pugh, the son of a prominent government minister. Pugh's limbs have been skinned, and Breen eventually determines that the young man was a heroin addict and suspects the post-mortem skinning was an effort to erase track marks. While contemporary readers might initially raise an eyebrow at Breen's naïvete when it comes to drugs—he's unaware that heroin is addictive, let alone deadly—Shaw convincingly makes the case that Breen's ignorance is a piece of the larger societal issue concerning the sharp uptick in hard drugs. Breen pushes forward without the support of his department—where his fellow coppers are all varying shades of dirty—and follows the clues to the inner workings of the London art world and a hippie commune in the center of the city. Shaw (She's Leaving Home, 2014) makes the gritty English capital come alive, and while the action is slow-burning, it's worth waiting for the inevitable explosion.
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940170205974 |
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Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
Publication date: | 01/27/2015 |
Series: | Breen and Tozer , #2 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
The Kings of London
By William Shaw
Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2014 William ShawAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-24687-3
CHAPTER 1
At the end of the summer a man takes his sick father to hospital.
The French have voted in de Gaulle again. Robert Kennedy has been shot. The Americans, stuck deep in Vietnam, are swinging behind the Republican, Richard Nixon, instead. The Soviets have just sent the tanks into Prague. It is autumn 1968. And London is always London and the rain that has been falling on it all summer is still falling.
The nurse behind the desk is plump and has a distracting moustache. She holds a gnawed biro in one hand and asks questions like, 'Any allergies?'
It is late night, or maybe early morning. The man is tired. It feels as if he has not slept for days. 'No.'
And, 'Next of kin?'
'Just me.' Because he's thinly built the man looks taller than he is. He is in his early thirties, from a generation that still dresses conventionally. A pale mackintosh. Cherry Blossom Light Tan shoes. A grey suit.
'Any other relations?' she asks him.
'No.'
'No one at all?'
The man shakes his head. The weariness shows in the dark skin beneath his eyes.
She takes her pencil and writes 'NONE' on the form.
It has been a long night. One of too many.
'Where can you be contacted in an emergency?'
'I'm a policeman,' says the man, as if that's an answer. And he gives the number of his local station in Marylebone.
'There's a waiting room at the end of the ward, if you like,' she says, pointing with her biro. Somewhere a radio plays an idiotic song by Alma Cogan.
'No. I'd better go now,' he says. 'I'll be back later to see how he is.'
The policeman is usually good with details but will remember little of this. Days of looking after his father between shifts has left him exhausted. Long disturbed nights after work. The dribbles of lukewarm soup around the old man's mouth. The bed baths and bedpans. Always the startled look in his father's pale eyes. Bringing his father to hospital today is a relief. He has had enough.
But he will regret that he did not stay longer. Really, there was no need to go straight back to work. He could have stayed just a few more hours. This is the cold black stone that will sit in his chest.
It has been a bad year. Right now he just wants to keep moving. To pause for too long would be to give in to the sadness of it.
As he goes to the stairwell to leave the building he is surprised to find that the world outside is still dark and quiet. He checks his watch. Ticka-ticka Timex. It is still only twenty minutes past five. The days have been so disorientating, so fractured. He had been inside the hospital so long he had imagined it would be daytime now, but it is still three hours before he needs to be at work. It would make sense to stay.
He pauses on the cold staircase. Not enough time to go back to the flat he shares with his father and sleep. And if he catches the bus to Marylebone, he will be much too early.
So he sets off walking. Out of the hospital, into the silent street.
He walks down through to Islington, down Caledonian Road, past torn posters advertising Judy Garland at the Talk of the Town, all the time cold wind at his back. The pavements are still empty, save for the occasional man returning from a night shift, or nurse waiting for the first bus.
It is six by the time the man reaches King's Cross and the sky is the colour of cigarette ash. The postmen are delivering letters. The milkmen are delivering milk. Men in pinstripes are starting to arrive from their suburban homes, leather briefcases swinging as they walk.
'They say it might be days yet,' he tells the office typist, who arrives at work forty minutes after him. She is young, wears a lot of hairspray and bright cardigans. She has smudged her mascara, he notices, but he doesn't tell her.
'You poor love,' she says.
'Don't worry about me,' he says, 'I'm fine.' He keeps his head down, hoping she'll get the message that he doesn't want to talk about it.
'I can get you something from the canteen, if you like?'
For an hour or so he sits at his desk, sharpening pencils, pretending to type reports.
And when the call comes in about some firemen discovering a body in a burned-out house in Carlton Vale he volunteers to be the officer at the scene without even thinking about his father. It will give him something to do.
He is down the stairs and out of the office and into the CID Wolesley in less than two minutes. An unexplained death is something to occupy the mind.
'Paddy. Message for you.'
He doesn't hear the voice, first time.
'Are you up there, Paddy?'
Or the second. The man is squatting, examining the remains of a room, concentrating on what he sees.
'Paddy!'
A room. A fireplace. A dull ooze on the floorboards.
'Paddy Breen!'
They have taken the body away earlier that morning. All that remains is this dark stickiness that had escaped from the roasting skin.
The detective sergeant is absorbing it all. An empty can of lighter fuel. Floorboards seared black. An old armchair burned back to the springs. He is taking it all in. He has seen worse. It would have been a quick death.
'Sergeant Breen!'
He hears this time: 'What?'
'Someone on the radio asking for you, sir.'
The house had been long derelict. One of a row bombed out during the war and still not pulled down. The walls bare, the plaster falling from the ceiling. Everything is uniformly black after the fire. He takes a last look around the room because so much depends on what you find in these first few hours. This is what he is good at.
'Coming,' he says quietly, picking up the empty can of fuel.
And he starts to make his way carefully down the charred stairs holding the empty can between finger and thumb. The black grease that coats walls after a house fire is everywhere. He already has it on his shoes but he's trying hard not to get it on his jacket.
At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a fireman's uniform says, 'Went up bloody quick, by the look of it,' and then hacks and gobs onto the bare floor.
'Right,' says Breen. He holds up the can. 'This what started it?'
'Got to be,' says the fireman. 'Too quick not to be petrol or something like it, poor stupid bugger.'
'Did it himself? By accident?'
'See it every now and then, yep.'
'Could this have caused such a big fire?'
The fireman stuck out his lower lip. 'Maybe,' he said.
Breen nods and steps outside.
'On the radio now, sir.'
Breen gets into the passenger seat and lays the can on the dashboard, then pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the smut off his hands.
'Delta Mike Five,' he says into the receiver. 'Breen here.'
And he should have called up the hospital then when the first message came through. Though it was probably already too late. The doctor will say it was a urinary infection that finally killed him, but his father had been dying for years, burning away slowly from the inside.
His father had almost killed himself in a fire six years ago, leaving the gas on under a pan. He had escaped with a bandaged arm. It was the first sign that he was unravelling. After the fire he had moved in to Breen's care.
So, Tomas Breen, builder, of Knocancuig, Tralee, dies alone that September afternoon. At the same moment as the nurse places the sheet over him, his son is staring hard at a different body, one as black as the room it was found in, in a white-tiled room in another hospital, half a dozen miles away. He stares at the dead man in the hope that something will start to make sense. An unidentified dead man in a cold room.
CHAPTER 2Breen kept the photos of the burnt body in his in-tray. Three black-and-whites. One of the man's disfigured face, teeth showing through burnt lips. One of the whole corpse, taken from the side. One of the whole room, showing the position of the body. Every now and again, as the weeks went past, they rose to the top. Sometimes the other officers in Marylebone CID caught him looking at them, peering closely.
Skin cracked like a spit-roast pig. Pale flesh and fat showing from below. Knees bent slightly.
Autumn turned to winter and the identity of the body remained a mystery. Other cases came and went. Nixon won.
Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen started to clear his father's belongings out from his flat, but never quite finished the job. He bought his first Beatles record, but only played it a few times. Music like that was for a younger generation. He thought about combing his hair differently and maybe growing his sideboards longer, but didn't. He was thirty-two. It would look ridiculous.
Precisely why the fire had started remained unexplained, officially at least, though Wellington, the police surgeon, said that a bottle had been found melted into the skin of the corpse. That and the empty can of lighter fuel meant it was probably an accident, and though Breen still questioned whether a single can could have created such an intense blaze, nobody else seemed that bothered by the fact. It was some drunken vagrant attempting to light a fire to keep himself warm in the wet weather, most likely. That was enough for Wellington.
Breen kept at the case longer than he knew he should. He returned to the white hospital room several more times to look at the charred corpse. Most of the skin on the man's face had been burned away, so it was hard to know what he would have looked like. There were no obvious signs of trauma on the flesh that was left. The longer he remained unidentified, the longer it seemed likely that he had been a dosser. Breen began to assume he had been one of the thousands of Irish labourers who were flooding into London now, desperate for work. Wellington confirmed this when he told Breen there were traces of concrete dust in the material on his trousers.
Breen wrote notes. He knocked on doors of boarding houses and asked if any of their tenants had done a bunk. He drew maps, marking out the locations of all the building sites in the area. He visited the Garryowen and the Palais on the weekend, where they danced to showbands playing 'Boolavogue' and 'Liverpool Lou' and other teary waltzes. In the Irish dance halls there were two or three men to every woman. Anyone know of a man who's gone missing? One less would give the rest of us a bloody chance.
At first other officers ignored his obsession. The man's father had died recently. He was not himself. Good man, Paddy Breen. Not one of the boys, exactly, but, you know, a good man.
But as time passed, Breen knew they were becoming irritated by him. This was not a real case for a CID man. Bloody Paddy Breen. Still wasting time on that no- hoper. Not pulling his weight.
There was other work to be done. Real people who had died in fights and robberies. Not alky immigrants whom nobody would miss anyway. Bloody Irish. Paddy excepted, of course. It was clearly just an accident so why was he so bothered about it?
'Don't waste your effort on jobs nobody's going to thank you for,' Sergeant Prosser had said, more than once. Breen noticed how it infuriated Sergeant Prosser that a fellow officer could waste so much time on a lost cause.
The inspector was kinder, letting Breen have his way at first. Once, in late November he caught Breen with the photos laid out on his desk. They were a little dog-eared now, yellowing already.
'For God's sake, Breen' he said. Very quietly. One man to another.
Inspector Bailey was an old-school policeman. Decent enough, but a stickler. He didn't like to see officers stepping out of line like this. Where would you be if coppers went around just investigating the cases that got under their skin? 'Still think he's a labourer of some sort, do you?' Inspector Bailey asked.
'Yes, sir.'
A pause. 'Your father was Irish, wasn't he, Sergeant?'
'Yes, sir.'
Bailey had nodded. Had given Breen an uncomfortable look. Other people in the room stopped their typing and listened. 'And he was a builder, I believe?' said Bailey. 'Your late father.'
'Yes, sir.'
'It's understandable that a man is upset when his father dies,' he said.
Breen didn't answer.
'Buck up, Paddy,' the inspector said, briefly laying his hand on Breen's shoulder before walking away, shutting himself in the small room that was his office.
And there was an embarrassed pause in the CID office. At the next desk Constable Jones, the youngest officer in CID, was staring, mouth open. Breen glared back at him until Jones looked down at his typewriter and pretended to be searching for a letter among the keys. The gentle hum and clatter of the office returned.
Breen knew what was going on in their heads. Paddy was not thinking straight. His obsession was nothing to do with the burnt man. This was about his father. It was like a penance.
Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes things didn't work out. There was not a solution to every crime. People died alone and unloved. He had never really bothered to find out who his father was when he was alive. He had not been curious enough.
Even if he did find out all about who the burnt man was, it wouldn't change a thing. Breen knew that.
CHAPTER 3So, the night of Sergeant Michael Prosser's leaving drinks at the Princess Louise, Breen decided to let it go.
That was it. The case would not be solved. Some things were never mended.
He had to get on with life. He was picking himself up. The world were changing. After six years of looking after his sick father, going home straight after work, he had started to come alive. Last week he had taken a woman back to his flat and made love to her.
A mistake, probably.
She had been a little drunk. A WPC.
But it was the first time he had been with a woman in years. He had felt the blood pulse in his body again.
He would tidy up his flat. Finally sort out his father's belongings. It was almost December. Next year would be different. 1969. The future was here. He should start living in it.
So he got up early the next morning. Last night at the Louise, everyone else had been drunk. Breen was not like the other officers. He rarely drank much; he was out of practice.
The others had stayed, singing, buying rounds and punching each other on the arm. Sloshing pints onto the sodden pub carpet. Breen had slipped out without saying goodbye to anyone. They would not be in till later. He could have some time to himself. He had plans.
On the Circle Line on the way in, a jester walked into Breen's dirty old carriage. He was dressed in green and blue and was shaking a stick covered in bells.
'Morning, comrades,' he cried out.
The train was stationary at King's Cross. Men lifted their newspapers a little higher or stared harder at the adverts on the other side of the carriage: 'Give Capstan This Christmas'. Or at the wooden floor, ridges packed with old fag ends.
The people Breen travelled with relied on the morning journey to work to be soothingly dull. A nothingness before the grind of work.
'Good cheer to you all, good folk of London town!' A shake of bells.
The man's hair was long. He wore a string of wooden beads around his neck. There was a new word the British had started using: 'hippie'.
'Be merry! Free yourselves from the chains of oppression.'
A man in a pinstripe suit sitting opposite Breen rolled his eyes. 'Merciful God.'
In his gaudy costume, the jester began trying to hand out what looked like paper scrolls. Breen noticed he was wearing open sandals. And his feet were engrained with black dirt. A traveller sitting next to Breen took one of the pieces of paper, but when Breen held out his hand the jester ignored him.
'Don't I get one?' Breen asked. The new Cathal Breen. Ready to engage with the world again.
'Don't encourage him,' hissed pinstripe man.
The jester looked Breen up and down. 'Methinks you probably wouldn't like it,' he said, moving on.
Further up the carriage, he held out another roll of paper to two office girls sitting side by side. They were too shy and pretended he wasn't there, folding their arms tightly, looking down at their shoes and giggling.
'Have you got a licence to do that?' the pinstripe man called down the carriage.
The jester stopped and looked back. 'Have you got a licence to wear that suit?'
The office girls burst out laughing, open-mouthed, shocked. They were still trying to stifle their laughter when the train jerked into motion. The man in the suit said, 'I'll report you to the police.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Kings of London by William Shaw. Copyright © 2014 William Shaw. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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