Hauntology: Tracking the Londoners Nobody Wants to See

This talks explores lost London as seen through socio-realist crime fiction.

Have you ever met a morrie, a boiler or a deviator? Had your drum done over by a screwsman or seen a Joe Ronce putting out girls on the bash? Using the underworld dialect of their times, a handful of writers recorded a forgotten London of spielers, speakeasies, dogtracks and moody gaffs. James Curtis, Donald Westerby, Patrick Hamilton and Derek Raymond had an ear for the street and an eye for those swept under by the dark currents of criminality. Through the socio-realist crime fiction from the 30s to the 90s, Cathi Unsworth retraces the steps of those writers whose sympathies for the dispossessed mirrored their own close proximity to the London of the lost.

Cathi Unsworth is the London-based author of The Not Knowing, The Singer and the forthcoming Bad Penny Blues, pop-cultural crime novels all published by Serpent's Tail.

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