Long, long ago London’s Chinatown was not a Gerrard Street enclave but a seafarers’ community in Limehouse. It took root in the late 1700s and by the 1880s had established restaurants, laundries and boarding houses in that riverfront part of the East End. Some of it survived into the 1980s – there was a brilliant old school restaurant there (I’ve forgotten its name), and the BBC police drama The Chinese Detective was set there at the dawn of the Docklands developments that would sweep its last remnants (including that restaurant) away.
Fiona Keating’s newly-published thriller, Smoke and Silk, is set in the Limehouse of 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper and the match girls’ strike, a time of opium dens, music halls and Queen Victoria’s heir Prince Bertie behaving badly. All these things and more appear in Smoke and Silk, the “more” including the investigation by resourceful, undeterrable and intermittently calamitous Pearl Fitzgerald of the gruesome Wapping Old Stairs murder of a Chinese man, along with lashings of lesbian longing and love action.
You don’t need to read the author’s acknowledgements to tell that her fiction is firmly anchored in historical fact, albeit with embellishments in the service of art. She vividly conveys an East End of muck, poverty, drunkenness, violence and general perilousness, as Pearl, daughter of an irascible Irish publican and a Chinese mum she never knew, takes us from Bow to Spitalfields to Poplar and many points in between without undue concessions to that salt-of-the-earth sentimentality from which cockney myths are made.
Law and order is inconsistently enforced by peelers of variable quality, whom Pearl pesters, tricks and beguiles dressed a succession of frocks, some of them her own (tattered, torn), others bestowed by lovers (luxurious, snug). She has a hot crush on an acrobat called Mei. Matters are not simplified when a man from her past unexpectedly turns up. Reader, I shall reveal no more…
Yes, Smoke and Silk fairly rattles along, taking death, grief, jealousy, petty theft, management malpractice, betrayal, dirt and dishonour all in its stride, finding time on the way for many saucepans of Cantonese cuisine and the very occasional bath.
You’re right, I enjoyed it – partly for its novel and accomplished variations on an effective fiction formula, and partly for its evocation of a strand of London’s migration history and cosmopolitanism that is often taken for granted or ignored, providing a fresh angle on the Victorian capital and the struggles, terrors, dangers and subterranean passions of that time.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here. Follow on Bluesky.