A TARNISHED ENGLISH KNIGHT: PHIL LECOMBER'S MIDNIGHT STREETS

Phil Lecomber gives us a fresh take on the private eye yarn in with Midnight Streets. It has the hardened, wisecracking detective, colorful gangsters, a plot that goes to the highest reaches of the city, and some pretty mean streets. However those streets run across London, particularly Soho, in the thirties, where our cockney brass knuckle toting hero, George Harley, plies his trade.

The story literally hits the ground running with Harley chasing down the runaway girl he's been hired to find to her abductor's apartment. The man kills himself before he can be brought to justice. Harley finds another girl tied up as well as crazed writings on the wall, inspired by a controversial book of libertine philosophy, Reflections In The Ice, which several copies lay about.. Scotland Yard believes Harley's discovery is connected to a rash of child killings and hire him for assistance, since he can travel through the London underworld in a way they can't. Harley's search has him getting into fights and rubbing some jewish gangsters the wrong way, but it gets more dangerous as he is lead to the upper class of London.

The book reads like a pulpier version of Caleb Carr's The Alienist. It's rich in period detail, making a world out of thirties London. He molds that setting with tough guy tropes straight out of Black Mask's finest. There are few guns, but fists fly often. Lecomber utilizes working class P.I. Harley to great effect in a society of boldly drawn class lines.

Midnight Streets is a private eye epic melding a historical backdrop with hard boiled thrills. It's place and time with it's own language (a glossary of period slang terms is in the back of the book) that George Harley maneuvers through. I hope Phil Lecomber has more dark alleys for him to go down.