London in Fiction: Soho Noir

Cathi Unsworth and Paul Willetts will be discussing Soho writing and James Curtis in particular.

Soho in the 1930s was a district where high life intersected with low life, sleazy cafés coexisting with bohemian pubs and chic nightclubs. It was also a district were aristocrats rubbed shoulders with artists, immigrants, streetwalkers and criminals. Of the writers who evoked that world, Patrick Hamilton is by far the best-known. Yet the under-rated novelist James Curtis deserves to be ranked alongside him on the strength of recently rediscovered noir classics such as The Gilt Kid and They Drive By Night. Like the best American noir fiction, these portray desperate characters trapped by circumstance, their fates played out against a bleak urban backdrop.

Novelist Cathi Unsworth and biographer Paul Willetts, whose books have sought to portray the seedy allure of mid-20th century Soho, will be discussing Soho writing in general and James Curtis in particular.

The London in Fiction series is organised in collaboration with London Books, whose London Classics imprint aims to bring the city's marginalised fiction back into print www.london-books.co.uk

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