My book, Blood Drunk, has two central characters. One is Freddie Burns, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking young Londoner with the world-weary cynicism of a sixty-year-old vice cop and the emotional intelligence of a toddler. He does his best, but it doesn’t always go very well. The other – sort of – is London itself, or at least a version of it. The book is set in the 1990s, a decade when London faced huge challenges – riots, homelessness, and a level of crime something like 90% worse than today – but also when it began to recover from its long-post war slump; a vast animal emerging from hibernation, cleaning the coal soot off its buildings and blinking in the bright lights of Cool Brittania. London has reinvented itself many times since the Romans, layers of history deposited then fractured by the tectonic forces of technology and money – a place of cracks and fissures under the concrete where all sorts of hidden stories play out in the dark. Here are a few of my favourites.
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