The Worms of Euston Square

Thanks to all those booklovers and musical fellows who have got in touch about the book. Campbell has donned his oil-skin cape again, and is en route to conduct negotiations with Garibaldi, the Bourbons and other great Victorian biscuits in the Vatican Library (in Latin).
Possible titles: SEE ROME & DIE
Chief of the Assassins, or
Lawless & The Roman Radical.
xxx William Worm's Party Invite Neither omitting more online vermicularity: your very own invite to Vermological party, at nobber o' the clock this very notchy.
Book available from Mercat Press or Amazon .

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“Envisage a city,” boomed a voice behind me, “as a body, pumping with fluids.” I turned to greet a smartly dressed man with an imposing moustache. He breathed in deeply, surveying the work around him with quiet satisfaction. “Blood, nerves, intestines, bowels. The whole kit and caboodle heaving with life.” Sir Joseph Bazalgette exuded verve and energy. Even as he spoke to me, little men began equipping us to go underground, arming us with galoshes, greatcoats and gloves. The great man shook my hand warmly and pulled on a deerstalker to top it off. “Sergeant Lawless, I take it? Pleasure. Official visit?” “Could we call it semi-official?” “You won’t mind if I carry on working. Terribly busy. Don’t require a canary, do you?” I looked at him in bafflement. “Regulations require a canary. Signal unexpected emissions. But I wrote the regulations. This stretch is secure enough.” Without further ado, he showed me to a makeshift wooden ladder. “Now, what the deuce is this about?”

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Thanks to the actors: links in Band Details to the left. And thanks to Ron for welding piquant and poignant illustrations of the age into these kinematographical trailers.

William Wayward W-Blog

Worth a look: the British Library's London in Maps exhibit, which includes a number of suspects from my book - Joseph Bazalgette, John Martin, John Snow (cholera solver), social inequity, slum clearance, tube and sewer contruction ...

More info, links & London gumph at World of Worms .

SABOTAGE, SCANDAL & STINK in Victorian London

The Victorians’ fervour for progress and reform transmogrified London: they created underground networks of sewers, gas, hydraulic pipes, underground rivers and trains; they rebuilt the inner city slums, instituted great works for the poor and banned the exploitative employment of children.

But what if you were one of those urchins? Banned from sweeping chimneys. Banned from scavenging in the sewers. And, likely as not, turfed out of your slum on the Euston Road by the cut-and-cover building of the bloody Metropolitan Line. The trains underground couldn’t drown out the revolutionary rumblings, and the Great Exhibition didn’t save the casualties of the Great Stink.

The Worms of Euston Square, a literary mystery set in Victorian London, is published by independent Edinburgh publisher, Mercat Press.

The Worms are a gang of urchins who help novice detective Campbell Lawless pursue an elusive activist, Berwick Skelton, into an underworld of sabotage, hoofers, stink and scandal.