City of Spades (25 page)
Authors: Colin MacInnes
C
OLIN
M
ACINNES
(1914–76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London, about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day.
Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill.
A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels,
City of Spades, Absolute Beginners
and
Mr Love and Justice
. His other books include
To the Victor the Spoils
, a disenchanted view of the Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War,
June in Her Spring
and
England, Half English
. Colin MacInnes’s essays were published in
Out of the Way
in 1980 and a selection of the best of his fiction and journalism is available in
Absolute MacInnes
, edited by Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.
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First published in Great Britain in 1957.
This ebook edition first published by Allison & Busby in 2012.
Copyright © 1957 by
T
HE
C
OLIN
M
AC
I
NNES
E
STATE
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1205–2
ALSO BY COLIN MACINNES
London, 1957. Victoria Station is awash with boat trains discharging hopeful black immigrants into a cold and alien motherland. Liberal England is about to discover the legacy of Empire. And when Montgomery Pew, assistant welfare officer in the Colonial Department, meets Johnny Fortune, recently arrived from Lagos, the meeting of minds and races takes a surprising turn …
Hilarious, anti-conventional, blisteringly honest and fully committed to youth and vitality,
City of Spades
is a unique and inspiring tribute to a country on the brink of change.
Frankie Love, new to his profession as a ponce, seems to run his illegal life on strictly fair principles. Ted Justice, recently appointed member of the vice squad, finds his upholding of the law complicated by love for his girl …
Love is travestied in the activities of the prostitute, justice mocked in the procedure of the vice squad, as Colin MacInnes writes with an authenticity which only an intimate knowledge of the seamier side of life can deliver. It is a world in which motives, friendships and values are never as simple as they seem.
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