Midnight Streets

A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.

When Cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl’s life on a dark London night in 1929, he doesn’t realise it marks the beginning of an investigation which will change his life forever. The incendiary novel which inspired the girl’s abduction also seems to be linked to a series of grisly murders that are taking place on Harley’s patch, and though he’s delighted to be asked by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again, he could do without the local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he’s a police informant. 

Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his ‘sherlocking’ in the frowzy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho – the city’s underbelly – peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers, and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes.

Here, the midnight streets are black as pitch and, as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the pea-souper smog, he begins to realise he may never find a way out.

Phil Lecomber was born in Slade Green, on the outskirts of South East London. Most of his working life has been spent in and around the capital in a variety of occupations. He has worked as a musician in the city's clubs, pubs and dives; as a steel-fixer helping to build the towering edifices of the square mile (and also working on some of the city's iconic landmarks, such as Tower Bridge); as a designer of stained-glass windows; and – for the last quarter of a century – as the director of a small company in Mayfair, which specialises in the electronic security of some of the world's finest works of art. Twitter/X: @PhilLecomber