The Piccadilly Noir Series - Midnight Streets

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, linking the crimes to an infamous figure from the past. Convinced that the police have the wrong man, Harley must use all his skills negotiating the dark underbelly of the city to 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, inspired by the works of Gerald Kersh, Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene (just think of Pinkie in Brighton Rock brushing the stale sausage roll crumbs from his mattress and you’ll get the idea). 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the villains are more likely to be wielding cutthroat razors than Tommy guns, and the wise-cracking Lauren Bacalls have been replaced by louche bohemians with belladonna eyes and ladders in their stockings.The midnight streets are black as child corpses, dismembered showgirls, occult sacrifices—George Harley constantly finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city where truth is as murky as the mustard-yellow smog and the sins are as dark and bitter as the stout porter beer.