Bell, Josephine - The Port of London Murders (1938)

Slow-starting but readable book about the gradual uncovering of a drug ring operating along the Thames. Bell seems to have taken a leaf out of Margery Allingham's book for this early novel, linking her drug trade with a chain of classy lingerie shops.

There is a big cast of characters and few of them stand out. The police detectives are thorough rather than brilliant, and the promising Sergeant Chandler comes to a sticky end far too soon. Detection is through found objects and conversations, not flashes of insight. We know the killer's identity long before the denouement, but little sympathy is employed on him or his victims, submerged as they are in the general misery and poverty of East London.

This is the area I was born in, twenty years later, when it had been cleared of its fogs and squalor. Bell's atmospheric descriptions of the Thames and the appalling conditions alongside it made me realise once again how lucky we are to live in a society that can afford health and hygiene for everyone.

Jon.