Curt Purcell, of the excellent pulp/weird fiction/horror/sci-fi/etc blog Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror has been inspired to explore “the ultimate urban setting, the original Big Bad City, the real Metropolis: London”. The list of books he plans to read is interesting in its diversity:
Here’s a listing of what I’ve set aside in my to-read stacks. I don’t plan to read these in any particular order, and I may not get to all of them this time around. In any case:
- Soft City by Jonathan Raban
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold
- The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
- The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
- At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
- Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
- London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman
- London Dossier by Len Deighton
- Burden of Proof (retitled Villain) by James Barlow
- The Long Firm by Jake Arnott (also with something about the BBC television adaptation)
- Tainted Love by Stewart Home
- The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman
- SAM 7 by Richard Cox
- The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
- Mother London by Michael Moorcock
- London Fields by Martin Amis
- Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green
- London Revenant by Conrad Williams
- Caballistics, Inc. from 2000 AD
It’s a list that can be almost infinitely extended, because there are few cities that have had such a hold on the public imagination as London. Sure, every big city has literature associated with it –even Amsterdam has writers associated with it, like Simon Carmiggelt– but London is different in that its attraction is worldwide, perhaps matched only by New York. Even Rome is only a village compared to London, as Nancy Mitford teased. Unfortunately, that does result into a certain amount of arrogance and navelgazing on the part of the London based media and literati circles, the illusion that because London is so important, they and everything they do is important.