LONDON FIELDS a novel by MARTIN AMIS

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They look just like ordinary fields in the outer suburbs of London, but something horrible lurks within their verdant depths.

Jimmy McInimminy a popular contortionist with the Wacko Brothers Circus encamped on Bromley Common, goes missing while walking his dog in fields nearby. His dog limps home – scarcely half the dog he used to be! A troop of hikers from Oswaldthwaite go rambling on some fields near Richmond – only one returns, babbling incoherently about something "’orrible under the grass". A whole division of the West Cheap Police Force scour some local fields, after a little girl, hysterically cartwheeling along the High Street screams “They’re after me!” - and disappear under mysterious circumstances; their boots & helmets are later found in a tidy heap bespattered with blood and some traces of poached salmon in white wine sauce.

Inspector Vasto (the man who solved the cases of the Dodgy Dietician from Deptford and the Glib Goitterschmenche from Glossop) is called in off vacation in Bangor and so begins an investigation so wide ranging, so unreal, so untypical, so so, that it goes down in the annals of Scotland Yard as the case of the London Fields.

Martin Amis is son to Kingsley Amis who wrote ‘Lucky Jim’ and ‘One Fat Englishman’. Martin Amis wishes to step out of the shadow of his father the celebrated novelist who was so important in the development of pulp entertainment in the 40’s.

Martin Amis says of his novel: “It started out as a complex weave of criminality set amid the hockey pitches of East London but soon became something beyond my control, something primeval in the fashion of Edgar Allan Pew.

Praise for London Fields:

“I’ll never go walking on Clapham Common again.” Elton John

“When the THING finally appears I’d lost interest” Quentin Crisp

“This sort of thing gives the suburbs a bad name” Purley Gazette