Vine Street - Dominic Nolan

 An absolute stunner!  One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder.  I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.

Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through.  Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself.  The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things.  The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters.  The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war.  It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.

Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot.  A work of pure genre genius.

Duffy - Dan Kavanagh

Duffy is the first of four detective novels written in the early Eighties by Julian Barnes under the Kavanagh pseudonym. You soon realise why the literary Barnes went pseudonymous. Duffy is a bisexual ex-copper, dismissed over allegations of paedophilia, and his manor, then and now, is Soho, which in 1980 was still the only reliable source of prostitutes, dirty films, mucky mags and live sex shows for London visitors.

Duffy has set up his own security advice business. He gets a call from a bloke called McKechnie, who imports jokes and novelties. McKechnie is being extorted over an affair with his secretary. Duffy investigates - and finds himself embroiled in a gangland power-grab which ends up with him in a very delicate situation with a cheese-cutter.

The novel is smart, funny and brilliantly written - a microcosm of its time and place.

Memoirs of the Forties - Julian MacLaren-Ross

Julian MacLaren-Ross was a character, a hand-to-mouth writer hanging round Soho and Fitzrovia between the late 1930s and his death in 1964.  His writing seems, on the basis of this, the first incomplete volume of his projected four-part memoirs, to have been heavily based on his life.  The short stories included here certainly give that impression, as does the helpful introduction by his friend and publisher Alan Ross (no relation).

MacLaren-Ross was born in 1912, of Anglo-Raj stock.  He spent much of his childhood and youth in the more glamorous reaches of France but by his twenties was flogging vacuum cleaners in a seaside town on the South Coast of England.  He was called up in 1939-40 but discharged from the army for reasons unstated in 1943.  His short stories based on his military experiences were his first moderate successes.  Before the war his most successful stories were set in Madras, a city in a country he had never visited.

For the remainder of the war he collaborated briefly with Dylan Thomas on the notorious Home Guard documentary that was never made, and after the war largely subsisted on radio scripts.  These memoirs capture the flavour of Fitzrovia better than any other I have encountered, even those of the much more successful Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, for example).  I especially enjoyed his description of BBC Drama Head Val Gielgud as "a man with two beards, one sprouting from each corner of his chin."  I also enjoyed the half-dozen short stories included, my favourite being the one that first attracted the attention of Cyril Connolly, then the editor of Horizon, "A Bit of a Smash in Madras."

MacLaren-Ross lived far too dissolute a social life to build a literary career, thus he will only ever be a footnote in the work of greater artists.  But that shouldn't detract from the fact that he writes like a dream, effortless yet stylish and controlled.  I loved reading this book.