It was in the mid-winter of 2023, when I first fell under the spell of London noir. I’d been back in town 18 months, after years hiding away in Complacency-on-Sea, and found the city I’d returned to was as ungodly as ever, a thick and vicious morass laden with big money, bent coppers and blue tents.
Soaring, empty skyscrapers had arisen in unthinkable parts of town, while chi-chi members clubs and high-value street robberies had taken over the West End. The Russians had fled but everyone else had jumped into the vacuum. It seemed everything was up for grabs; municipal land, catalytic converters, Patek Phillipes, the soul of the city.
The story on everyone’s lips around this time was the Zac Brettler case, the tale of a north London schoolboy who was found dead on the banks of the Thames, after getting caught up with some old school villains. Then there was Vanity Bar, the Soho stripclub that had been spiking its punters and emptying their bank accounts. There was the Saif Rubie trial – a football agent who had allegedly ‘taxed’ a rival agent of an expensive watch in some godforsaken restaurant. There were infinite stories of murky property deals, eunuch rings, candy store money laundering fronts and Westminster kompromat scandals that even the broadsheets couldn’t quite land. I saw somebody define it as ‘London noir’.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, who were slowly falling in line with the safe, prescribed experience of pubs and pushchairs, I didn’t want to keep the action, or the juice, at bay. At a time when I was supposed to be settling down, softening the edges of my day-to-day life, I wanted to run my fingers along the capital’s underbelly, to hear its false promises and wild-headed schemes. I wanted to become entangled in something weird, sexy and dangerous. But first of all, I had to find it.
the crux
Endless are the film and literature historians who have tried to define the ‘noir’ genre. But for me, the best summation comes from that laureate of the American style, James Ellroy, who described it as such: ‘You have just met a woman, you are inches away from the greatest sex of your life… but within six weeks, you’ll be framed for a crime you didn’t commit. You’ll end up in the gas chamber, and as they strap you in, and you’re about to breathe the cyanide fumes, you’ll be grateful for the few weeks you had with her, and grateful for your own death.’ Which, to my mind, sounds a lot like a membership at 5 Hertford Street.
London noir is an interzone, a shadowland where villainy collides with ambition, eroticism, slime and glamour. The 24-hour slot machine pit on Holloway Road, or Leicester Square at 2am, may crackle with evil, but really, they’re more depressing than alluring. In noir-land, there has to be something worth dying for; the scope to make a fortune, to meet the fire of your loins, to escape from the drudge.
It isn’t entirely a new concept. Long before Raymond Chandler started venturing down those mean streets, the city had an established canon of noir-ish art and literature that spans everything from Victorian horror novels to early Hitchcock films. There are the key literary texts; Hangover Square, London Fields, The Caretaker, Hawksmoor. There are movies like Sapphire, Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday. There’s Walter Sickert and Francis Bacon too. But the reference that really sticks in my head is actually a flop reality series from 2014.
Bravo’s Ladies of London started out as a low-budget attempt to create a ‘Real Housewives of Sloane Square’ before being cancelled after three seasons. But in its afterlife, the series has taken on an air of tragedy and intrigue. In some uncanny convergence of fate, one of the show’s periphery characters is the late businessman Scot Young, whose demise was the subject of endless speculation, after he was found impaled on the railings outside his Marylebone flat.
