![]() ![]() Like the best of crime, from the LA noir of Raymond Chandler, the Nordic noir of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, or the "Florida glare" of Elmore Leonard, The Slaughter Man is saturated in details. Gruesomely, the meat market becomes a resonant symbol, too, in a novel which touches on both the sex trade and children as currency - a subject that has been of interest to the author since he was assigned to cover the work of London's vice squad as a young reporter.Īs a novelist, Parsons has always been good on a sense of place - from London to Phuket and Shanghai - but as a crime writer place is more than just a setting it's part of the thriller writer's arsenal for drawing the reader in. ![]() The Slaughter Man moves from The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, "where no expense had been spared and no taste exercised", to a travellers' camp off the A127. But far from a dusty Victorian idea, in contemporary London, with the super-rich and the marginalised world of immigrants and sex workers, the distinctions seem, if anything, more pronounced. The lost children of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as the Dickensian leitmotifs of unexplained dubious wealth, prostitution and murder, chime powerfully with Parsons' own themes here. Charles Dickens set a famous scene in Oliver Twist here, and Parsons tells me that it was only when he was in Smithfield, waiting for inspiration to strike, that he discovered the scene inscribed in stone. ![]()
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