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| Escaping to London’s naughty
square mile |
Writer Mike Hutton’s family
were convinced he had a misspent youth with all his sleazy tales
of Soho, writes Charlotte Chambers
IT all started in a notorious Soho restaurant with the question
‘did you used to be on the game?’
As writer Mike Hutton wiped the 70-year-old prostitute’s
drink from his face she spluttered “how dare you!” before
whispering “how did you know?”
Soho enthusiast and writer of The Vice Captain, Mr Hutton had
been fascinated with the “steamy old place” for years,
and had already penned two books about the area. But his encounter
with the ageing working girl, and a vice scandal that involved
the Maltese Messina Brothers, who ran a prostitute racket in the
1950s, got him thinking. He started visiting the British Library
Newspapers in Colindale to find out more, and called in on lots
of Soho hangouts and characters to research the book.
Mr Hutton, who was born in Hampstead in 1938, went to the old
Haberdashers Aske’s Boys’ School on Westbere Road, now
Hampstead School, where he says “I was always in trouble”.
After leaving school he went to run a textile factory in the Midlands
before moving to Islington for six years, which he described as
“a great place then – not posh like it is today”.
A fondness for Soho also stemmed from his boyhood, when he spent
a lot of time there with his parents. He says: “If you’re
not looking for trouble you won’t find it, but underneath
everything Soho is quite tough.”
Concerned with getting every street and date right, Mr Hutton
also included real-life characters from the time, like journalist
and professional alcoholic Jeffrey Bernard (pictured right) and
Peter Rachman, London’s most notorious landlord who was known
for buying up tenanted slums, and then hiking up the rents –
forcing the residents out so he could install his prostitutes
and pimps.
Mr Hutton says of his attention to detail: “If I got something
wrong some smart-arse would be sure to let me know.”
From the comfort of his cosy Leicestershire farm house, Mr Hutton
wrote the book while listening to music from the era to get him
‘in the mood’, and in the meantime drive his wife and
six children mad.
The novel covers French madams and West Indian prostitutes who
specialise in S&M, as well as powerful clergymen and ministers
indulging in domination, along with gangsters and alleyway beatings.
Mr Hutton’s family, who wonder at his imagination, “marvel
at where I get my ideas from, they think I led a really misspent
youth – which I didn’t”. Despite his interest in
crime, Mr Hutton has a greater respect for law-abiding citizens.
Not looking to glamourise crime, the motivation behind ‘The
Vice Captain’ was to look at what turns a ‘good’
man ‘bad’.
The first explosive line of the book – “My father was
hanged at Pentonville Prison in Febraury 1954” – follows
a ‘Hutton’ trend. “I try to make all my first lines
hit the reader between the eyes,” he says. Derek Emms, the
captain of the novel’s title, is described leaving his adulturous
wife and boring shop job, to become a heavyweight figure in a
criminal underworld, commandeering a cluster of hookers as an
Italian gangster’s right hand man. Ultimately the novel is
a reflection on how he chooses his own fate.
“I wanted to make him likeable, because it was important
that the reader could relate to him. He had to be a good anti-hero,”
explains Mr Hutton. “I tried to create a man who had had
a ‘good war’, based on men who came back and found they
had to be civvies for the upper class who had ‘got out’
of service.”
The book has found an appreciative audience with those who lived
through the era, including raconteur and jazz singer George Melly,
who said of it: “I thoroughly recommend this book, not only
to those who knew the crime world, but also those whose escape from
suburban mores was via ‘London’s naughty square mile.’” |
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