Joe Thomas on writing about one's past within Red Menace

I was born in Hackney in 1977 and for 25 years I wanted to leave. Now, it’s an aspirational address, gentrified and expensive. I was born in Hackney Mothers’ Hospital on Lower Clapton Road which was later to become known as ‘Murder Mile’. I lived on Mildenhall Road, just down from Clapton Pond. I wrote White Riot to try and better understand the Hackney I grew up in, the time and place, and how the borough, it seems to me, is something of a lightning rod for the political and social currents of the country. I wrote Red Menace to extend the geographical focus, to widen it to other areas of east and north London.

Red Menace is a historical, social crime novel about police corruption, institutional racism, the devastating effects of Thatcherism, and the counter-cultural movement of the ‘80’s. The novel takes in Live Aid, the Broadwater Farm uprising, the Wapping Dispute and, like White Riot, is rooted in the Hackney experience of the 1980s. Mark Sanderson, writing in the Times, called White Riot, ‘a love letter to London, seething with outrage’. In Red Menace, the love is still there, but I think the outrage is intensified.

I remember the Hackney Show on Hackney Downs, the Labour Club in Dalston, steel bands and heavy reggae, kids in I Love ILEA and GLC t-shirts, Granny’s takeaway and Chimes nightclub, where, for a period, serious violence was a regular occurrence. 

In the novel, I write about the Hackney Show of 1986, one I went to, and the fictionalising of it is an insight into how I accessed sensual memories, sights and sounds, smells and tastes to try to recreate – and reimagine, resurrect – Hackney in the 1980s.

Here’s an edited extract from the novel that I think is instructive:

Over the weekend, the football season safely finished for another year, there’d been the festival up on Hackney Downs, the Hackney Show. Fairground games and food, Jean Breeze and Dennis Bovell, the London All Stars Steels and the Perpetual Beauty Carnival Club, stunts, stalls and side shows –

Across the park, on the north side, a little bit away from the festivities, a tent emitting pounding reggae, pulsating dub.

He and the boy had wandered over towards it, the towers of the Nightingale Estate to their right, Hackney Downs School to their left –

The tent shook with the soundsystem, the sides flapping, the roof lifting and falling, one or two men dancing on their own just outside it, shirts off and bare feet, eyes red, eyes wild –

Jon felt the bass tearing through him. The boy slowed down a touch as they approached.

Jon shook his head and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy close, like when he was a shy toddler, wrapping himself around Jon’s leg, pouting.

The volume and depth of the music made the lights shake and flash.

Air thick with smoke –

Jon seeing the boy’s eyes start to water, not a great deal else.

They stayed about fifteen minutes, Jon recognising a Steel Pulse track that had been stripped right down and then powered right up, an MC over the top of it, that was enough.

On the way out, one of the Rastas winked at the boy, grinned.

‘Welcome to Jamaica,’ he said.

All of this is true, all of this happened, but how much more is there that I can’t remember? 

Writing about your own past in the context of a transparently political novel, a novel unashamedly interrogating society, does something to your own history; if you can get that right, then it’s a good start.

Red Menace by Joe Thomas (Quercus) Out Now

Live Aid, July 1985. The great and the good of the music scene converge to save the world. But the TV glitz cannot disguise ugly truths about Thatcher's Britain. Jon Davies and Suzi Scialfa have moved on since the inquest into the death of Colin Roach, but they're about to be drawn back into the struggle - Jon by his restless curiosity and Suzi by the reappearance of DC Patrick Noble. Noble's other asset, the salaried spycop Parker, is a pawn in a game he only dimly comprehends. First, he's ordered to infiltrate the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham; next will come Wapping, ground zero of a plot to smash the print unions. But who is Noble working for, and how far can he be trusted? The Iron Lady is reforging the nation, and London with it. Right to Buy may secure her votes, but who really stands to benefit? Corruption is endemic and the gap between rich and poor grows wider by the day. Insurrection seems imminent - all that's needed is a spark.

Writing the Crime Scenes: Location as Inspiration by Karen Lee Street

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru — a mystery involving old enemies, lost soul-mates, ornithomancy, and the legendary jewel of Peru— is set primarily in early 1844 in the city of Philadelphia, with some brief forays to the Chachapoya mountains in Peru. But it all began in Hackney.

I made my home in that part of London for fourteen years, living in a building that overlooked London Fields and what was once an immense plant nursery renowned throughout Europe. I was surprised to discover that my urban neighbourhood had been a tourist destination in the early nineteenth century due to its enviable collection of exotic flora and the fact that it boasted the largest hothouse in the world. The more I researched the Hackney Botanic Nursery Garden, the more I felt it might be an interesting location for a crime story, and that notion was a key inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru.

Some of the facts that led to the fiction are these: the Hackney Botanic Nursery Garden was originally founded by Johann Busch, a German immigrant who settled in Hackney in the mid-eighteenth century. He rented land on Mare Street and supplied unusual plant specimens to private botanical gardens in Europe. Busch also grew plants from 'Bartram's boxes', collections of seeds put together by John Bartram who had a famous nursery in Philadelphia, now a 45-acre National Historic Landmark called Bartram's Gardens.

When Johann Busch went to Russia to be Imperial Head Gardener to Catherine the Great in 1771, this connection continued, but through Busch's friend and fellow German émigré Joachim Conrad Loddiges (1738–1826), who took over the business. Joachim Loddiges's son George (1786–1846) developed the nursery further with a tropical rainforest display, a palm house, and hothouse collections of orchids, ferns, and other exotic plants that fascinated Victorians, thus making it a popular destination for tourists. George Loddiges also employed plant collectors to bring back unusual flora and fauna from South America, particularly specimens for his ornithological collection, part of which is now housed in the Natural History Museum in London.

One explorer Loddiges hired was Andrew Mathews (1801—1841) who called himself "a traveling collector of natural objects". I discovered that Mathews also gathered seeds and plants for Bartram's Nursery in Philadelphia, but couldn't find out much more about him except that he married a Peruvian woman, they had a son, and Andrew Mathews died at the age of forty in the Chachapoya mountains of Peru, no cause of death given. Was it through accident? Disease? Foul play? The idea for a murder tale began to ferment…

It wasn't only Andrew Mathews who had a connection with the borough of Hackney and the city of Philadelphia. Edgar Allan Poe lived in Stoke Newington from 1815 to 1820 during his boyhood, and he resided at various addresses in Philadelphia between 1838 and 1844, where he wrote some of his most famous tales. I wondered if Poe had visited the impressive Hackney Gardens as a child or had gone to see the Bartram Gardens in Philadelphia whilst living there—and if these locations might be incorporated into my ideas for a Poe & Dupin mystery trilogy. Given George Loddiges's immense collection of avian specimens and that Poe's most famous poem was inspired by Charles Dickens's pet raven Grip, birds seemed to be a subject worth exploring when concocting a plot.

And so, I returned to Hackney and created a character named after George Loddiges's daughter Helena (1818 - 1871), making her a skilled taxidermist, practitioner of ornithomancy, and an amateur ornithologist who had written a book on the subject. I reasoned that if Poe were hired by Helena Loddiges to edit the book (as he was hired to edit The Conchologist's First Book (1839)), the fee would not only provide the typically impoverished Poe with the means to travel to London in book I: Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster, but would also suggest plot points for book II.

Hackney, Philadelphia, and the Chachapoya mountains are scenes of fictional crimes investigated in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru and are three places that have more connections in truth than one might initially imagine. The hothouses of the Loddiges plant nursery are long gone, but the Loddiges family vault is located in the gardens of the Church of St John-at-Hackney. Poe is buried in Baltimore, but his former home in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia is a museum one can visit and Charles Dickens's pet raven Grip (which Dickens had stuffed by a taxidermist after his death) is entombed in a glass box on display in the Philadelphia Free Library. Andrew Mathews died in the Chachapoyas, but how and precisely where is lost to history… as is the mysterious jewel of Peru.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru by Karen Lee Street is published by Point Blank, paperback £8.99.