There’s a part in Brighton Rock where Greene’s seventeen-year-old psychopathic protagonist, Pinkie, walks in on the rest of his gang holding an impromptu parley in his room at a boarding house. On his way upstairs, the rickety banister wobbles under his hand; when he opens the door, he finds the gang sprawled across his bed, smoking:

The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt’s sausage roll. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘A meeting?’

The loose banister, those sausage-roll crumbs – with such deft touches, Greene perfectly illustrates the fact that, for Pinkie Brown, there is no glamour in crime. The world “the Boy” and his gang inhabit is shabby and seedy: a world of cheap lodgings, stale food, and badly fitting suits. It is a million miles from the polished country-house murders of Agatha Christie – but very close to the world of George Harley.

Harley is the cockney private detective protagonist of my Piccadilly Noir series, set in London during the 1920s and 1930s. He does his “sherlocking” in the frowzy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho, among ponces, streetwalkers, and East End mobsters. This is gritty crime noir – but unlike the noir of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, it’s a distinctly British affair: grubby bedsits, all-night “caffs”, and Gold Flake cigarettes; villains wielding cut-throat razors rather than Tommy guns; louche bohemians with belladonna eyes replacing the hard-bitten femme fatales. When building Harley’s world, I drew heavily on Brighton Rock and other similar novels of the period – especially those of Gerald Kersh.

I first encountered Kersh after finding one of his books at a jumble sale in the 1970s. Though largely forgotten today, he was once one of England’s most successful writers. His stories of lowlife characters and bohemian drifters sparked my fascination with London during what became known as the “Morbid Age” – the anxious, politically charged interwar years.

Before creating the Piccadilly Noir series, my previous attempts at writing fiction had suffered from trying too hard to emulate writers I admired, such as Angela Carter and Ray Bradbury. Eventually, I realised I needed to find an authentic voice. Rather than trying to write the sort of book I imagined might appeal to agents or publishers, I decided to write the kind of book that would genuinely interest me.

That decision sent me back to revisit interwar Britain. I spent nearly two years immersed in the period: reading history books and novels, watching documentaries and films, and absorbing the texture of everyday life between the wars. Many of the novels centred on people living at the margins of society. Alongside Kersh and Greene, I read writers such as Patrick Hamilton, Norman Collins, Julian Maclaren-Ross, James Curtis, Robert Westerby, and Simon Blumenfeld. Some of these books introduced me to the extraordinary richness of London street argot: rhyming slang, back slang, tramps’ slang, Polari, Yiddish, and Romany. Over time I built up my own glossary of interwar slang and phrases to use in the novels.

At the end of this period of research, I realised I wanted to write detective fiction set during the Golden Age of crime writing, but without the stately homes and upper-class refinement associated with Agatha Christie or Margery Allingham. My detective would operate in the seamy underworld of a city battered by the Great Depression. And instead of a fastidious Belgian sleuth or aristocratic amateur, my protagonist would be a streetwise cockney wide-boy.

Enter George Harley: a politicised, autodidactic, working-class war veteran who, for me, seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the era. I wanted his world to have the same gritty realism I admired in Kersh’s fiction, and so, gradually, a supporting cast began to emerge from the shadows: the ex-boxer Solly Rosen; the Jewish mobster Mori Adler; Limehouse Lil, who runs a drugs racket out of the docks; the murderous chiv-man Benny Whelks; the ragamuffin informant Alfie Budge; Dora, queen of the courtesans; king of the clubs, Jerry Paladino; and the upper-class conman Burlington Bertie – alongside a whole underworld of petty criminals, jaded streetwalkers, “dilly boys”, and small-time ponces.

As George Harley’s world began to take shape, I realised just what a gift interwar London is to a novelist. It was a period in which old certainties were breaking down, and society was becoming increasingly politicised. Economic hardship and social instability pushed many towards desperate choices, and not infrequently towards extreme ideologies such as fascism and eugenics – with catastrophic consequences waiting just over the horizon.

It is also a period that resonates strongly with the modern world: economic anxiety, political polarisation, and democracy under strain. The parallels are hard to ignore.

But alongside its gritty realism – and a good measure of the Londoner’s fatalist humour of the period – the Piccadilly Noir series also carries a darker, more gruesome streak, like a string of gristle running through a dubious steak. Whether it is dismembered corpses, occult sacrifices, or iniquitous conspiracies, Harley repeatedly finds himself drawn into the macabre undercurrents of a city whose sins are as dark as stout porter and where truth is as murky as a mustard-coloured pea-souper. These crimes are definitely not cosy.

The first book of the series, Midnight Streets, is available now from Titan Books, with book two, The Devil’s Banquet, due for release on 23rd June 2026.