It’s 2011, a rainy October morning in south east London. Former undercover officer, DS Max Lomax, is assigned to the murder investigation of community activist, Fraser Neal, found dead in an alley a stone’s throw from New Cross Station. Figurehead of a campaign to halt the sale of publicly-owned housing to private developers and a thorn in the side of the Metropolitan Police, evidence emerges that Neal may also have been DS Lomax’s informant, digging dirt on the dark money entering London in the run up to the Olympic Games.
The Last Days of Johnny Nunn is set five years on from the closing scenes of Never Walk Away at another pivotal moment in our recent history. In south east London, Max is on home turf, the ghosts of his past never far away. Smoke from the summer riots hangs in the air. Mutterings and repercussions colour the judgement of the Murder Investigation Team and the community, testing allegiances to breaking point. As Max retraces Neal’s final movements, he’s forced to question the idea of ‘home’. What does it mean when your life and community are torn apart?
Throughout the writing process, I came back to conversations I’d had with Mike Hodges over the years about the civic corruption underpinning Get Carter – at the time, I’d been researching the impact of urban regeneration projects. In one email, he wrote: ‘It’s an awful, yet curious, phenomenon witnessed many times in my lifetime: communities being destroyed one after the other. And being helpless to do anything about it. Curious because it’s happened under the flag of “progress” – dehumanisation is considered “progress”?’
Johnny Nunn’s story picks up those threads. When we meet Johnny, he’s been living on the streets, at the end of a fruitless quest to find his missing teenage daughter. Seeking to reconnect with what’s left of the life he left behind, he struggles to come to terms with changes in his old neighbourhood. When he witnesses a violent altercation on his first night back, he takes a stand that comes at devastating personal cost.
The Last Days of Johnny Nunn sets DS Lomax on the trail of dark money and the violence done to keep it dark. With a new breed of white-collar criminal capitalising on the bread and circuses distraction of the London Olympics, he pits himself against the enablers, a succession of shadowy characters facilitating the laundering of criminal proceeds, buying political influence that all but guarantees immunity from scrutiny. The events of the novel unfold between the streets and estates of south east London and commercial and political worlds. Decisions are made that erase communities and dissenting voices are silenced. This time, Max’s stake is personal: these are his streets, the place where home truths matter more than any other.
The Last Days of Johnny Nunn is published by No Exit / Bedford Square Publishers Bedford Square Publishers | The Last Days of Johnny Nunn
