STAR INTERVIEW

The London crime novel is in the best of hands with Dominic Nolan. He tells Tina Jackson about writing the under world in his latest novel, White City

Crime touches every aspect of human lives, so when it comes to writing, it makes sense to paint it on a very broad canvas. This is the approach taken by Dominic Nolan, one of the most interesting and original crime writers currently putting words on the page. His last book, Vine Street, and his latest, White City, are crime novels as widescreen epic: thrillingly ambitious swathes of visceral literary writing that are as much social and historical London novels as they are crime fiction.

‘Crime’s far too broad a subject for it to be one genre,’ says Dominic. ‘I think of it as a subject matter rather than a fixed genre or approach. I never think of crime as a genre. I think I’m coming to crime in the city and how much of history is really a history of crime. It becomes organic, part of the place, and London, after the war, was a very particular place.’

The London of that time, says Dominic, was in rubble – morally and economically as well as literally. ‘I was interested in postwar pre-reconstruction. It took a long time after the bombing for London to get back on its feet. London was a series of wastelands – so I was interested in that post-apocalyptic time and how to convey it.’

White City is a retelling of the 1952 Eastcastle Street Robbery. A Post Office van was held up and the robbers escaped with £287,000, making it, at the time, the biggest post-war heist. The crime was never solved, but it laid the foundations for a new ‘project’ approach to executing crime: the meticulously planned and executed robbery.