When you think of the all-time great settings for crime fiction, London always has to be somewhere on the list—possibly right at the top.
If nothing else, the Baker Street home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cerebral crime-solver Sherlock Holmes guarantees England’s capital a place in the heart of all mystery lovers.
Now, with the Capital Crime festival—which last week celebrated its arrival at a new home in the heart of the city (the Leonardo Royal Hotel), right in the shadow of historic
St. Paul’s Cathedral and a five-minute stroll from the river Thames—having become the go-to event for authors wanting to bring out and promote their latest works, London is enjoying becoming the center of attention once more.Julie Mae Cohen, the U.S.-born multimillion-copy best-selling and award-winning romantic fiction novelist, chose London as the setting for her debut crime thriller, Bad Men, and Capital Crime as the ideal place to launch it. “I must admit I was at first toying with the idea of setting the book in New York,” she says. But she changed her mind after a trip to west London’s upmarket Kensington district where she spotted the exact house she knew her protagonist, the socialite and former model turned feminist serial killer Saffy Hunter-Oliver, would live.
“I started with Saffy’s home and then worked backwards from there,” Cohen explains. “London’s a great place for crime novels and I always knew that, really. I’m completely obsessed with the Sherlock Holmes novels. They’re the reason I first came to England and fell in love with London.”
London journalist Matt Nixson, who works for the UK national newspaper the Daily Express, hosted a discussion at last week’s festival about the city being the perfect place for crime fiction. He has his own theory as to why that is.
“Although there are TV series like Luther shot here, they’re the exception rather than the rule,” he says. “I often speak to scriptwriters who say it’s hard to set anything in London because it’s so expensive to film in the city. That leaves the field open for novelists to use London settings that aren’t already over-familiar to readers because they’ve previously been used so much by TV.”
Erin Kelly’s The Skeleton Key was one of two London-set novels, alongside Elly Griffiths’ Bleeding Heart Yard, to feature among the winners of this year’s Capital Crime Fingerprint Awards. She says, “London’s a great place for crime novels because it has very few boroughs where rich and poor don’t live very close together. One of the things I write about in my books is what happens when social deprivation runs up against privilege. That makes for very fertile ground for crime writers, because to want what other people have is a great motivator for crossing moral lines.
“In The Skeleton Key, my narrator lives on the canals of London. They are a really interesting part of the city because they’re quite classless. You’ve got the rich living on million-pound houseboats moored in Chelsea, and at the other end of the scale you’ve got someone living in Hackney Wick, which is absolutely lawless in parts, on a barge that’s about to sink.”
Kelly maintains that London-based crime novels have been enjoying a wonderful moment in recent years. “I can’t get enough of Susie Steiner’s Manon Bradshaw series, Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan novels about an Irish detective in the London Met [the Metropolitan Police], or Sarah Hilary’s Marnie Rome books. All of them are beautifully written, clever, sensitive, compassionate series that touch on what it’s like to be a woman on the London police force. They are the only police-procedural series I’ve ever started from book one and followed religiously all the way through.”
For Capital Crime festival organizer Lizzie Curle, no discussion of modern London-set crime novels would be complete without considering the aforementioned Bleeding Heart Yard, by Elly Griffiths. “There’s something innately mysterious and romantic about London,” she remarks, “and nobody captures that better than Elly has.”
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