I’m not a big reader of crime fiction (outside of the golden age), but Susan’s review of A Little London Scandal by Miranda Emmerson (2020) piqued my interest. At the time I bought a copy for my Dad’s wife, and then when I saw the paperback in a charity shop recently I swooped. It turns out Miranda Emmerson has adopted Wales as her home country, living in south Wales with her family and completing a PhD at the University of Cardiff. Which means the month of Reading Wales aka the Dewithon, hosted by Paula at Book Jotter, is the perfect time to pick this up!

Set in 1960s Soho, Emmerson brilliantly evokes the area before the gentrification and chain stores that characterise the area today. Anna Tredway works as a dresser in the Galaxy Theatre with faded and disillusioned actors. She lives alone above a café and is missing her partner Aloysius who is in Jamaica following a family bereavement.

“Anna had her neighbourhood. Covent Garden for raspberries and carrots – even at five o’clock in the morning. Seven Dials for rags – shift dresses and corduroy skirts and a hundred shades of polyester blouse. Monmouth St for coffee bars – so many coffee bars – musicians and actors and students out on dates. The city thought itself a monument to pleasure, but its citizens knew better.”

Anna is drawn into a very different side of London society when a male sex worker, fleeing a police raid, is found dead in Waterloo Gardens, in the grounds of the Hellenic Club. The Hellenic is one of the men-only clubs around Pall Mall, and its members include Richard Wallis, an MP who has just managed to hang onto a seat despite being caught up in a previous scandal with another sex worker:

“He was still a little staggered by the way in which influence could appear in someone’s life. Power, really. And, then, how quickly it could disappear. What he felt now were the ripples of something he used to have.”

Anna knows Nik Christou from the café. A young, vulnerable sex worker, gentle and intelligent, far away from his home in the north of England.

“Nik liked to notice mistakes in things. He loved to sit in the pictures and watch the same film over and over again. Thinking about the people in it and if it all made sense. If the guilty were guilty and the innocent, innocent.”

When Nik is arrested for the murder, Anna can’t let it go. She works with DS Hayes, a policeman with whom she has a spiky relationship, to fight Nik’s corner.

They make an enjoyable and recognisably human team. It became apparent that I’d missed a previous book with these characters (Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars) but it didn’t matter. A Little London Scandal can stand entirely on its own and the characterisation was strong enough for those of us that missed the first instalment.

Anna is well-meaning but uncertain and aware of her limitations. Hayes is not a typical 1960s policeman but managed not to seem anachronistic:

“He couldn’t banter. His dirty jokes would have seemed tame in the mouth of a 12-year-old. He never physically hurt a suspect and he refused – uncomfortably and with an enormous amount of embarrassment -to take bribes. Every day he was a policeman and every day he somehow failed at being a policeman.”

I also really liked the portrayal of Wallis’ wife Merrian, stuck in the role of a perfect MPs wife – domestic, supportive and silent – and failing to perform:

“Merrian sat for a while in the hall and watched the dust motes move in the shadow of the stained glass above the door. She felt calm when she sat in darkness. When the house was still, when she was alone, no one could get at her.”

Emmerson weaves this disparate cast together expertly. The situations never feel forced and the societal pressures on them all  – at a time of change when things aren’t changing quite fast enough – are evoked believably through the characters’ experiences rather than using them as clunky pawns to hammer home certain points.

“The memory of not knowing what to do in certain places. The fear of getting it wrong. It infects people, like a cold.”

The crime/thriller aspects were well-paced and not predictable. But it was the characters and societal commentary which kept me reading. I was really rooting for these flawed, sympathetic people to find some peace.

“Sometimes that whole world turns out to be exactly what you thought it would and still it’s just a bit shocking.”

To end, a 1960s song about Anna: