Frankie Love, new to his profession as a ponce, seems to run his illegal life on strictly fair principles. Ted Justice, recently appointed member of the vice squad, finds his upholding of the law complicated by love for his girl…

Love is travestied in the activities of the prostitute, justice mocked in the procedure of the vice squad, as Colin MacInnes writes with an authenticity which only an intimate knowledge of the seamier side of life can deliver. It is a world in which motives, friendships and values are never as simple as they seem.

MacInnes is a fascinating author who throws much light upon multi-cultural London life at the dawn of the 1960s.

COLIN MACINNES (1914-76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day. Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill. A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.