Why Soho? By Jessie Keane

Well if I am going to talk about Soho, then first I am going to have to give you a little background. I ran away from home when I was sixteen (maybe even fifteen, now I think about it). I walked out of school (I’d hardly ever attended, anyway), walked away from the ruins of my family (the family firm had collapsed, we’d been evicted by the banks, my father had just died of lung cancer) and went to London to stay with my friend Joanna, who had a dirty little flat in Soho near Berwick Street Market. 

I never saw the dirt, of course. A Romany child used to open country, I took one look at the teeming city of London and in particular the steamy streets – Old Compton Street, Frith Street - of Soho and fell utterly, hopelessly in love with surroundings that were so very different to the ones I’d grown up in.

Then I fell in love all over again, with a man we met one night. We came out of Raymond’s Revue Bar and went into the Windmill Theatre and there he was. Sadly, his attention was focused on Joanna, but my attention was focused on him. I’d been scratching away in notebooks ever since I could crawl, writing playlets, westerns, sci-fi fantasies, anything. But the sight of this man knocked me sideways and convinced me that I would have to set him down on paper. The black curling hair. The sapphire-blue eyes. His flashiness, his Savile Row suits, his vicuna coats, his shoes from Lobbs, his latent aura of power. Gorgeous!

Of course, I was a minnow among sharks in 60’s Soho, but my extreme innocence was a sort of protection. I sailed through every obstacle and filled notebooks full of details I noticed as I passed through. That black-haired man with the gangster look about him became, inevitably, set in my mind. He never left it, not even when I came back to my boring existence at home. He stayed with me all through relationships, marriages, moves, everything, until one bleak day I was sitting under a quilt watching a crime DVD. I couldn’t afford to heat the flat, I was too poor for that. I had no education, no money. I’d had a succession of boring low-paid job. Wrapping chips in the local chip shop. Sweeping up in a hairdressers. Slicing bacon in the Co-op. Now I was really on my uppers, but I was still making notes and dreaming of being an actual, proper writer.

Then Annie Bailey – who would later become Annie Carter – strolled into my head and I thought, what fun. A strong Alpha woman and I would place her in among the gangsters and see what she would get up to. 

I sold my wedding dress, bought a typewriter, and set to. Before three months was up, I had finished writing the very first of the Annie Carter novels, Dirty Game. Of course, that gorgeous man I’d met in the Windmill in Soho was in there too, clashing with Annie at every turn. It was the most fun I’d had, ever, writing, that book. People talk about writers ‘finding their voice’ and I had always laughed at that, not understanding what they meant. Suddenly, I did. I’d found my voice with a vengeance.

So off I trotted to the Post Office, clutching six carefully wrapped packages. Each one contained a synopsis and a copy of the book, bound for a variety of agents. At this point, my partner took pity on me.

‘You’re bright,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s time to stop all this dreaming. Get a proper job.’

Which made me dig my heels in all the more. I posted the manuscripts off, and waited. Rejection slips soon poured through the door. Four of them. But two out of the six were interested, and one said she might have someone who would like this book, but not to get my hopes up, and why hadn’t I numbered the pages? I was that inexperienced, that much of a numpty!

That agent invited me to London, talked me through a few alterations. I was so happy to get back to the Smoke, I was ecstatic. Even if nothing ever came of this, at least I’d got to the first fence.

I went home, rewrote. Sent the thing back to her. It was August Bank Holiday, nothing was happening, publishing was empty of workers, she told me. Just hold on. Don’t get your hopes up.

I didn’t.

Then two days later she phoned me again.

‘I’ve got you a three book deal,’ she said. ‘For a six figure sum.’

I couldn’t help but think I had Soho, my time there as a wet-behind-the-ears, my meeting that beautiful black-haired stranger, to thank for this miracle. So don’t ask me why Soho. Ask me why not Soho. It may be changed these days – a little tamer, a little more polished – but anytime I go back there now the magic, for me, remains. 

This is the place where I found my inspiration and became a professional writer, this is the place that inspired Dirty Game, the very first of the Annie Carter novels and now I am launching the seventh novel about her and her dangerous, glamorous life and her love/hate relationship with Max. She had come a long way, baby! And so have I. Dirty Game shot straight into the Heatseekers chart at number one, and all my books have been in the Sunday Times Top Twenty chart. So I have a lot to thank Annie for. And Soho, bless it!

Never Go Back by Jessie Keane is published 2^nd February 2023 in Hardback by Hodder, priced £16.99

The Carter women don't follow the rules: They make them.Gangster Max Carter and his ex-wife Annie Carter are leading separate lives in separate countries: past hurts and broken promises cannot be resolved. But then a summons to Majorca and a tragic death makes Max question all that has happened to him over many years. He had two brothers - both are now dead. His closest friend has been found hanging from a London bridge. As the police wrestle with a seemingly unsolvable case, Max is forced to revisit his painful past to find answers to a mystery that seems to make no sense at all. Who is targeting his family and why? Annie Carter is at a crossroads in life. She has a luxurious lifestyle but no one to share it with, and Max clearly thinks she is in danger too. Her daughter, Layla, has left her mafia lover Alberto Barolli and is back in London, stumbling into the police investigation and making waves. You should never go back, so the old saying goes. But then, the Carter women don't follow the rules, they make them. And when the truth of what's been happening is finally revealed, will the Carter family stand together - or will it finish them for good?

More information about Jessie Keane can be found on her Facebook page. You can also follow her on Twitter @realjessiekeane

Lies That History Tells Us by Dominic Nolan

 

HISTORY IS NOT FACT, IT IS NARRATIVE. That’s worth repeating a few times. History is constantly changing. As I write this, historians have dated an Egyptian mummy to a thousand years before the sophisticated mummification process that preserved it was previously thought to have existed, significantly altering what we thought we knew about the Age of the Pyramids. As Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, notes: “If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.”

History is not fact, it is narrative. English can be an unhelpfully ambiguous language at times. Let’s look at that word, “history.” It is commonly used to refer to the events of the past, yet it also isn’t the events of the past at all but is the discourse we have with those events. The continuous record we create of the past. We shape the past into a narrative from a multitude of sources – physical evidence, for sure, but also written testimonies, i.e., other narratives. History, like fiction, is a way people have of coming to terms with themselves, of defining themselves through the agency of words. All narratives are ultimately attempts at saying what the world feels like.  

 History is not fact, it is narrative. There is really less to distinguish fiction from nonfiction than might commonly be believed. Historians make choices, just like novelists. No historian simply compiles an itinerary of past events. They emphasize, they project, they disproportion. These are all things I did when writing Vine Street, which starts with a series of real-life murders in 1930s Soho. They remain unsolved to this day, but that fact was inconvenient, so I changed it. For a historian, facts are things to be proved and documented. For me, they are things to be manipulated, or even destroyed.

History is not fact, it is narrative. To misquote F. Scott Fitzgerald, being a writer is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and retain the ability to function. On the one hand, as a writer my personal priority is not fidelity to historical facts, but fidelity to authenticity. My Soho is populated by real figures from history, some of them doing things they actually did, and others doing things they certainly did not. My hope is that the reader finds it all so plausible that in the end it makes no difference what did happen and what did not. Research and a genuine knowledge of the period in question allow me to roam freely within my subject, but also unfetter me from any particular historical data.

History is not fact, it is narrative. On the other hand, whilst embracing an irresponsibly cavalier attitude toward fact myself, I am always aware of the immense debt I owe historians. The work they do proving and documenting facts is essential for me – without them first establishing “what could be possible,” it would be impossible for me to write my fictional narratives. Without them establishing ground rules of historical fact, I could not establish authenticity in my fiction. However, when that fiction is written, it must stand on its own legs, provide its own moral context, otherwise as an art form we are saying it is reducible to a dependent offshoot of other, purer forms of narrative, such as history and sociology. I don’t believe that to be true.

History is not fact, it is narrative. Probably we want historians to be more responsible liars than I am. Raymond Carver’s last published short story before his death, “Errand,” dramatizes the death of one of his literary heroes, Chekhov, at the Hotel Sommer in Badenweiler (an event his widow Olga recounted in her memoir). For details, Carver leaned heavily on Henri Troyat’s biography, written just a few years previously, but also added a healthy dollop of poetic licence with the introduction of a dishevelled porter bringing champagne to the dying writer’s room. In Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcom reminds us that this imagined character seeped into a later biography of Chekhov, with Philip Callow inexplicably including him (as well as other unattributed colour created by Carver) in Chekhov: The Hidden Ground.

History is not fact, it is narrative. That a biographer would document fictional composition as historical fact would mortify historians, but as a writer of fiction it is surely the highest honour. To write something fictional, and yet so historically authentic that it was mistaken for proven fact, is surely what all novelists dream of. Although he didn’t live to see it, Carver literally changed history. What I would give for an imagined aspect of my Soho to turn up in some future historian’s narrative, to worm its way into the historical record. I want the Soho of Vine Street to feel that real.

Vine Street is published in hardback, digital, and audio by Headline on 11^th November 2021.

Soho, 1935. Sergeant Leon Geats' patch.  A snarling, skull-cracking misanthrope, Geats marshals the grimy rabble according to his own elastic moral code.  The narrow alleys are brimming with jazz bars, bookies, blackshirts, ponces and tarts so when a body is found above the Windmill Club, detectives are content to dismiss the case as just another young woman who topped herself early. But Geats - a good man prepared to be a bad one if it keeps the worst of them at bay - knows the dark seams of the city.  Working with his former partner, mercenary Flying Squad sergeant Mark Cassar, Geats obsessively dedicates himself to finding a warped killer - a decision that will reverberate for a lifetime and transform both men in ways they could never expect.

You can follow Dominic Nolan on Twitter @NolanDom.