Peter Ackroyd The house of Doctor Dee Penguin 1994 In the present our narrator inherits a ramshackle and strange house in an unnaturally blighted bit of Clerkenwell. He soon learns, by choice and by force, of it's, and his own, strange past. No-one does the spooky and buried history of London better than Ackroyd, and here he does things with ghosts, various shades of sex, 16th Century science and alchemy, and spooks, entertains and stimulates us something wicked. The rare longeurs are provided by some of the ramblings of the Doctor in the sections that deal with his searchings for the many secrets of creation, including the secret of the creation of life outside the womb, and the whereabouts of the buried monumental remains of the earliest legendary London. A fire to the imagination. See also Hawksmoor and The Plato Papers.		Edward Marston The amorous nightingale Headline 2000 Detectives in recent Brit-written crime novels seem to be either loving fathers or unloved bachelors. On these pages we have Commissario Brunetti and Marshall Guarnaccia representing the domestic tendency and there's Morse, Adam Dalgleish and Aurelio Zen amongst the grumpy unmarried with their tendency to arty obsessions. Edward Marston doesn't choose which kind of investigator he's going with, he has one of each. Happily married stolid constable Jonathan Bale and single architect Christopher Redmayne are employed again by the King after he receives a ransom note - an actress, also his mistress, has been abducted. The constable is a puritan and the architect has an elder brother, prone to vanity and debauchery, who has put some work his way involving an even worse fop than he, but a considerably richer one. So the stage is set for a story which ranges far and wide through the classes and attitudes of post-Great Fire London and which grips from the start. This is a story of plot and character, rather than description and atmosphere, but recently rebuilt Restoration London is so strongly evoked as to be almost one of the characters.
Anthony Burgess A dead man in Deptford Being the 'true' story of the life and murder of Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe, the other Elizabethan playwright. It's written in a mock 'authentic' Elizabethan style, and the author doesn't bother with quotation marks when people speak. These two factors add to the feel, but don't exactly aid comprehension. It's worth persevering, though, as the story is gripping - despite the fact that we know how it ends - and the detail dense. Things Elizabethan were, a couple of years back, hot, what with the films Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love (which features Marlowe, played by Rupert Everett), and all. But for some deeper understanding, much talk about religion and buggery, and some real London atmosphere, do give this one a go. See also Nothing like the sun, AB's take on Shakespeare.		The Frost Fair Alison & Busby 2002 The fourth of the Redmayne and Bale mysteries begins with London's post-fire rebuilding progressing nicely, but with the city in the grip of weather cold enough to freeze the Thames. And with this freezing London acquires a new wide thoroughfare, with a fair soon thriving upon it. This famous fair of 1683 is where constable Bale and architect Redmayne meet again at the start of the book, and where a body is found embedded in the ice. This body turns out to be that of an Italian fencing master, and he has Redmayne's dissolute brother's dagger in his back. The ice is soon gone, but the plot sweeps on as Redmayne tries to prove his brother's innocence, with Bale's help. There's a deal more atmosphere this time, and romance. But it's the turns in the plotting, and the delving into deceptions, that keep you reading, of course, and these Marston manages with ease. And his post-fire Restoration London, with its fresh brickwork and old animosities, is most convincingly evoked - maybe the man truly is 400 years old.

 

Carmina Burman (trans by Sarah Death) The Streets of Babylon Marion Boyars 2008 As if there weren't enough natives obsessed with Victorian London and its grim and transgressive side we're now importing them from Sweden! But Ms Burman does such a good and odd job here - and has such an interestingly-named translator - we'll willingly welcome her to the fold with open arms. This story starts with famed author Euthenasia Bondeson and her beautiful niece Agnes arriving in London in 1851 to see the sights and visit the Great Exhibition. The Exhibition and the city are nicely imagined and evoked in the authoress's eccentric voice - it's period and slightly-off-kilter foreign and also speaks of her 'artistic' sensitivity. The overall effect is characterful and fruity, bordering on the gothic. They visit Spitalfields, of course, and are horrified; then Agnes disappears and a blonde-haired corpse is discovered by mudlarks. Very few of the characters are what they seem, and as the story progresses there are transvestites and secretly-gay characters spread amongst the revelations of villainy and debauchery. The plot deals with the abduction of girls and gruesome murder too, but it's that singular and self-revealing voice of our heroine that is the book's most impressive achievement. This one richly earns its place next to the Waters, Fabers and Starling on your shelves. Clare Clark The Great Stink Viking 2005 The Great Stink of 1858, and Bazalgette's plans to solve the stink with better sewers (dealt with in the somewhat dry non-fiction book below) form the backdrop and setting for this tale of trauma and murder. William May is a deeply damaged veteran of the Crimean war whose job helping survey the old sewers gives him plenty of opportunities for the secret self-harming that is his shame. He gets involved in corruption and violence he is ill-equipped to deal with, and a murder is committed. Another strand of the tale tells of Long Arm Tom, a 'tosher' a man who makes his living on what he can find below and who supplies live rats for dog fights. How these tales connect is part of the mystery that keeps you greatly gripped. But even if the plot hadn't gripped, the sensual detailing in Ms Clark's descriptions of London above and below ground would keep you reading and smelling and tasting Victorian London like no book I've read in ages. A treat for all senses, as well as the wits.		Charles Dickens I've hesitated in embarking on the mighty CD as I've never known quite where to start. I've read a fair few of his novels in the past (and A Christmas Carol very many times) but that was then. Anyway, having read two novels in quick succession, and recently visited his house in London, I now feel ready to make a start. A tale of two cities This one was maybe not the best beginning start as the action is split between London and Paris, but it has a reputation of being one of his best, and as not his usual fare. There's not a lot of sentimentality on show here and the central female character is less drippy than many Dickens heroines - these being two oft-heard criticisms. The story mixes the big picture with a tale of a family and a love triangle. There's a lot of history and politics and brutality in Paris, and in London there's much familiar cynicism about the legal system, including some time spent in the Old Bailey, which I was reading at the same time as doing jury duty there! Other London sites include Temple Bar and an idyllic-sounding house in a quiet corner(!) of Soho. So not a bad starting point, then, with its mix of large and small concerns, and a good galloping pace for its short length. The Pickwick Papers This one is more archetypal Dickens fare, and much longer. It also pokes much sharp fun at the legal establishment, which is to be expected as it's Dickens' first book and so his recent experience as a law clerk was still hideously fresh. It's a baggy but enthralling mix of the travels and adventures of the Pickwick Club - four well-meaning chaps with time on their hands - and the stories that get told to them on the way. The stories range from the macabre to the socially shocking and add spice to the main adventures, which smack a little of P. G. Wodehouse with less laughs initially, but take our heroes into the Fleet prison and matrimony, eventually. It ventures memorably into debtors' prisons and coaching inns, covering the Borough and the home counties too. Maybe not a good place to start for its length and lack of a big plot, but unputdownable for the weeks it takes to read.
Michel Faber The crimson petal and the white Canongate 2002 When a book is 835 pages long it has to be special, if it's going to take up as much space in your imagination as it does on the shelf. This feat this book achieves, effortlessly. It tells the story of Sugar, a whore famous for doing and being anything her clients desire, despite not possessing breasts or beauty of the traditionally appealing sort. She is taken up and whisked away and kept at a Marylebone address by the unwilling heir to a soap-making empire. Her attentions help him forget his mad wife and his future in lavender-scented consumables, and with her help he becomes the prosperous man of business. Fortunes are made, madness and lusts hidden, relatives are buried and servants dismissed, as in any Victorian novel worth our trouble. The difference here is that this is, being written recently, a Victorian novel with our times written all over it. It lacks the modern tricks of The French Lieutenant's Woman, say, but the strong women just are strong women, with no self-conscious 70s politicising, and the sex does not happen unseen by the sensitive reader. All of which is refreshing. London is presented in all its grimy glory, and there's poverty and suffering as a constant backdrop. No wrong notes are struck, and the writing is impressive - you'll grin with appreciation even after the first few chapters, where lesser authors are content to confine their fireworks to before the plot takes them over. A big new book well able to hold its own in the company of the big old books on your shelves. The Apple Canongate 2006 To read The Crimson Petal... was, for most of us, to love it and recommend it to all friends. But to finish it was also to be troubled by the lack of a neat resolution in the lives of the main characters. So here's a book of seven short stories featuring characters from the big book but - as the author reveals in his foreword - the immediate fate of Sugar and little Sophie is not, despite the letters from so many readers whose heart-felt pleas he reveals, dealt with. Although in the last and longest story he does...well I'll not spoil it. What we do get are glimpses into Sugar's early career in Silver Street, and later episodes in the lives of other characters, lives she's affected, in one way or another. (One of which features a rat/dog fight, bringing back memories of The Great Stink, reviewed above.) These self-contained shards of life are satisfying, and have all the same strengths and touching depths as the novel, but this is a neat volume with narrow paragraphs and widely-spaced lines, so we're still talking about tasty snacks rather than a feast. But a treat nonetheless. Tobias Hill  The love of stones faber 2001 This is the story of a magnificent brooch called the Three Brethren, and of one woman's travels tracing its history and whereabouts, from it's creation in the fifteenth century to its nineteenth century disappearance. It's the story of precious stones, and how they obsess and blight lives, as our modern-day heroine tracks the gems through London, Istanbul and Tokyo, learning how they have affected other lives, and her own. I was going to put it in related works and link to it from the author's Underground below, but its middle quarter suddenly conjures up such a fine, sensual and smellily believable picture of Victorian London and so earns a place on this page. It follows recent trends by using Spitalfields and Shoreditch as places for our two 19th Century characters - a jeweller and his brother - to work and live. There's a grubby street urchin too, and a convincingly drawn young Victoria, with her high sweet voice and her own stone obsession. The historical and the modern are effortlessly blended, and the characters are more than strong enough to stick in the mind. You'll learn more than you might need about precious stones, their cutting and polishing, and their trade, but you'll enjoy it, and much else here		Lee Jackson   London dust Arrow 2003 The author is the man behind www.victorianlondon.org, a considerable cornucopia of facts, and a large bibliography to boot. The period of the setting of his first novel is no surprise, then. The fact that it is a damn fine and atmospheric read was less guaranteed: creating a fascinating web-site doesn't mean you're automatically going to be able to write gripping fiction. And grip this one does, with convincing and detailed topographic description, authentic grime and squalor, and a plot both comfortably familiar and pleasingly convoluted, involving the mysterious death of a music hall singer and the subsequent disappearance and possible suicide of her friend. Each chapter is headed by the places its action covers, and these places and routes are real and researched. Walking from Stoke Newington (where I now work) to Whitechapel via the Angel and Shoreditch (where I was born) is a little indirect, but a nicer walk than the direct route I'll admit. The story mentions, but avoids confining itself to, the current cliché stew locales like St Giles and Shoreditch and Spitalfields, but Seven Dials and Wapping feature largely, as does Holywell Street of pornographic repute. This dark Dickensian London seems to be the London of choice for novelists at the moment - maybe it's a millennial thing - and you'll find that this one reeks as authentically and reads as well and smoothly as the best of them.   The last pleasure garden Heinemann 2006 You'd be forgiven (by me anyway) for thinking that the famous pleasure gardens of London were an 18th Century thing but, as this book illustrates, they were still going strong in the 19th. They had become more than a little sordid by the end of the century, but that's pretty much as we've come to expect from this period. The action here revolves around Cremorne Gardens, a pleasure park in Chelsea which opened in 1846 and was sited where Lot's Road power station is now. Bits of Battersea and the posher streets of Chelsea feature too. There's murder, squalor, baby farming, elopement, and piety aplenty as Inspector Webb and Sergeant Bartleby attempt to sort out who murdered who and who just threatened it. The plot is involving snaky again and the detail and writing evoke the period faultlessly and flowingly. Mr J knows his time and his places, and so this one has the same authentic smell and grip as the last.
		Andrew Martin The necropolis railway faber 2002 There was, truly, a funeral train which ran directly from a special station near Waterloo Station in London to the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. In this novel Jim Stringer, a boy from Yorkshire with romantic railway ambitions, comes to work on the trains at Waterloo, and soon finds himself involved in a violent murder and virulent trade unionism. As the bodies pile up and he delves into the recent history of the Necropolis Company our hero begins to suspect that he wasn't employed merely for his enthusiasm and inter-personal skills. The plot ticks along nicely but the detail and the atmosphere's the thing - grimy late-Victorian life under the viaducts has rarely been more believably evoked. And in the Waterloo/Nine Elms setting we have an area of London not much written about.  See The Blackpool Highflyer for a further adventure of Jim Stringer.
Anne Perry The face of a stranger 1990 The first in the series of fragrant crime novels featuring policeman William Monk and nurse Hester Latterly. The books and characters grip like a thing which grips very strongly, with Ms P's sound grasp of Victorian attitudes and the vagaries of human emotions keeping you enthralled until the end, resulting in many missed tube stops for your correspondent. A breach of promise (aka Whited Sepulchers) 1998 I read this before The face... and, despite some lingering doubts that Victorian London was quite SO full of traumatised sufferers of post-Crimea syndrome, it grips too, and deals with some convincingly messy sexual politics free of Victorian stereotyping. She turns a mean plot, and writes much much better than we have any right to expect. A dangerous morning  1991 And I read this one too soon after The face... and became a little tired of Hester banging on again about how awful it was in the Crimea. And Perry's habit of reminding us of so many things we'd read in the previous book. But I was still gripped by a tale of a rich and titled family eaten away by rape, murder, snobbery and arrogance, and Monk and Hester's developing relationship, and Monk's being kicked off the Force. I just think that I'd best leave a little space of time before I read the next one. The Whitechapel Murders  2001 And the next one I read was this one - an instalment in Ms P's other series, featuring Inspector Pitt and his rich wife Charlotte. This one begins with the Inspector stripped of his superintendentship as punishment for his - large - part in the conviction of John Adinett, a man from the upper classes who would usually have thought himself above the law. Pitt is sent undercover to track anarchists in the East End, leaving his wife to cope as best she can without him, and with the task of finding further evidence of Adinett's guilt, including a motive, so as to shock the mysterious hidden men of power into putting Pitt back in his job. Charlotte soon wimps out of this and the dirty work passes to one of Pitt's ex-colleagues and the family's maid. They uncover much corruption and dastardly plotting which could bring down a monarchy and a government corrupt and heartless. There is a real feeling of a social system that stinks and is about to fall and a finely evoked sense of impending doom. The plot grips as usual, but the setting - Spitalfields and Whitechapel - is less than fresh in recent London fiction and leads to some not unexpected Jack the Ripper business, which is a bit of a lazy choice. But a better blend of detection, emotion, social issues, politics and millennial fear you'd be hard pressed to find.
S. M. Peters Whitechapel Gods I wasn't sure where to put this one, as it's very sci-fi but is set in an alternative Victorian London. In this hellish version East London is made up of vast looming and ramshackle towers and Whitechapel is walled off and is the lair of the two ruling deities, Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. The book is about the rebellion against these steam-powered gods, unsurprisingly, with much made of the way in which humans, through surgery as well as a strange disease, are everywhere become half machine - infected with machine parts and becoming boiler-powered. This is all very visceral and Japanese anime-inspired, and makes this a book not for the squeamish. You'll spot Matrix-y details too, amongst the more usual steam-punk elements; which is not to say that this is merely derivative - it does a fine and fairly fresh job of combining Gormenghast strangeness with Dickensian squalor. The conclusion relies maybe too much on drastically shifting allegiances and trippy dreamy sequences, but on balance this entertains quite mightily. (Have you noticed, though, how if an American writer currently needs a character from out of London they always choose to have them hail from  Manchester?) There are other big cities in the UK outside London you know. Philip Pullman The ruby in the smoke Point 1985 This is the first of the Sally Lockhart series, by the author of the wonderful His Dark Materials series. Both series are written for teenagers, but this should in no way put off us more mature readers. Pullman writes so well his young readers are sure to be disappointed with a lot of the books they read when they grow up. He effortlessly evokes place and character in a way that makes you feel immersed in the one and feel for the other. Sally Lockhart is an orphan in Victorian London, solving the mystery of her father's death, and all the odd events and papers and friends which pile up in its wake. It all seems to revolve around a fabled ruby and the mystery of its whereabouts and powers. As the plot thickens she has encounters in all the usual Victorian stews - Limehouse, Seven Dials, Wapping - visiting opium dens and a photographer's studio and other places where a nice girl shouldn't be seen. Sally seems a girl more of our time than her own, though, even if she is not without her doubts and immaturities. Her Father's tutelage has left her able to ride like a Cossack, shoot straight and true, and her accountancy skills are pretty deadly too. An unusually good story and characters to care about. Belinda Starling The Journal of Dora Damage Bloomsbury 2007 As her husband the bookbinder's illness swiftly worsens Dora finds herself forced to take up his trade to keep the business afloat and her family out of the workhouse. In doing so she takes on some shady aristocratic clients, and learns rather too much about 'special' books and their readers, and more than she'd ever imagined about herself. So we're sucked into the underbelly of Victorian London again, and it's a sordid and dark place of course. Along the way the author ticks almost all of the new Victorian novel boxes: the Necropolis Railway runs past the bindery, our heroine makes trips to Holywell Street (where the best bad books were sold), there are gay characters and ex-slaves and even a mention of the Great Stink. Which takes in the subject matter of pretty much all of the novels in this Century's section on this site published post-2000. But she does it all so exceptionally well, with barely a foot put wrong, and authenticity so thick and sticky you'll need to clean your glasses regularly as you read. Victorian London lives and breathes, as do the characters. This is that certain Faber and Waters quality we're talking about, which makes the sudden death of the author after completion of this book all the more of a tragic shame. Sarah Waters Fingersmith Virago 2002 Another engrossing pseudo-Victorian novel involving the interconnection of the lives of toffs and roughs in grim London and the green countryside. It's classic stuff, featuring asylums, thieving, murder, a hanging, charismatic dark villains, pornography and gloves. The plot is for the bad people to get their hands on the inheritance of the niece of a crusty old country bookworm. She being a naive waif who's not, it turns out, who she seems, or who she thinks she is. To effect the plot the other main character becomes her maid, but she may not be who she seems either. The plot-twists involving who's who here do spin maybe a little too often. And the fact of all the male characters being villains or milksops, whilst the women are all admirable and noble - with even the worst of them acting nobly at the end, just prior to her hanging - is a little simplistic and pre-post-feminist, if you see what I mean. The trials of our heroines keeps you reading, though, and the London scenes are very fragrant. Especially good are the descriptions of their separate approaches to the City. There's a little light lesbianism too, which adds to the many flavours of this tasty big novel. (Dealing as it does with the business of period pornography this book ventures into the notorious Holywell Street, also mentioned in London Blues )		James Wilson The dark clue faber 2001 This is no ordinary book. In it Walter Hartright and Marion Halcombe – two characters from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – are commissioned to write a biography of J.M.W.Turner, England’s greatest artist and a man of mystery, to say the least. Actually Hartright is asked, and Halcombe, his sister-in-law, gets involved too. As he tries to get to the truth of the contradictory elements in Turner’s reputation, and to decide who is telling the truth and who is lying, or maybe no-one is lying, or maybe everyone has some interest…well, you get the idea, and as his enquiries progress, so do the changes in his personality keep pace with what he learns of the contradictions of Turner’s. As he investigates the artist’s estrangement from society so he descends himself, into a state akin to madness and into the squalid depths of Victorian London and the Victorian psyche. And the reader’s roller coaster mirrors Hartright’s, so that you come out of it moved and drained. You will look at Turner’s paintings with new eyes, which isn’t to say you’ll be nearer to a clearer understanding, just that more possibilities open up, and the ambiguities become even more fascinating. Like life, eh? I’m a bit sceptical about books being able to change your life, but this one certainly makes a good attempt, and will keep you enthralled long after you finish it. Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Leaving aside all the literary and biographical baggage, this is a novel which conjures up London between the wars like very few more straightforwardly topographical novels manage to do. I read it after having seen the film The Hours and been ashamed of never having previously attempted to read anything by the daunting Ms W, but it's pretty gripping. It follows the thoughts of Mrs Dalloway as she prepares for a party, and then follows the thoughts of the people she meets, who themselves interconnect with others whose thoughts we follow, sometimes as they themselves consider the character we've just been inside, as it were. There's much walking and travelling in London as the day unfolds and there's much telling and odd detail.