Phil Lecomber
Author
New Release
Midnight Streets
(Release date: March 2025)
George Harley is a cockney private detective in late 1920s London. While investigating a series of grisly murders he uncovers a trail of hidden clues, linking the crimes to an infamous figure from the past. Convinced that the police have the wrong man, Harley must use all his skills negotiating the dark underbelly of the city to track down the real killer. The investigation leads to a clash with an occult mastermind, an encounter which will have dire consequences for the rest of his life.
Piccadilly Noir Series - Book I
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PICCADILLY NOIR is a crime fiction series set in the late 1920s, featuring the private detective, George Harley. Although the milieu is that of the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from an Agatha Christie country house. Our working-class hero does his ‘sherlocking’ in the frowsy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of London’s Soho—the city’s underbelly, peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers and East End mobsters.
"A walk on the wild side of 1920s London. Dark, atmospheric and utterly compelling." — Jake Arnott, bestselling author of
The Long Firm and The Fatal Tree
Unlike the American noir of Chandler and Hammett, PICCADILLY NOIR is a strictly British affair. It’s a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, and Gold Flake cigarettes, where the villains are more likely to wield cutthroat razors than Tommy guns, and the wise-cracking Lauren Bacalls have been replaced by louche bohemians with belladonna eyes and ladders in their stockings.
"Lecomber’s jaw-dropping debut is exactly what I want from a historical hardboiled novel." — Duane Swierczynski, New York Times bestselling author of Lion & Lamb, California Bear and Secret Dead Men
PICCADILLY NOIR is as black as pitch, with a gruesome streak running through it—like a string of gristle in a dubious steak. Whether it’s dismembered corpses, occult sacrifices, or iniquitous conspiracies, Harley constantly finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city whose sins are as dark as stout porter beer and where Truth is as murky as the mustard-coloured smog.
"If Patrick Hamilton and Dashiell Hammett got hammered in Soho, this is the novel they’d have come up with.
A cracking debut." — Martyn Waites, author of the Joe Donovan crime series
About Phil Lecomber
PHIL LECOMBER is the author of the PICCADILLY NOIR series of crime thrillers. Phil was born in 1965 in Slade Green, on the outskirts of South East London—just a few hundred yards from the muddy swirl of the Thames.
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Although he now lives in the beautiful West Country city of Bath, most of his working life has been spent in and around the capital in a variety of occupations ...