The Long Firm - Couverture souple

'The Long Firm is more than an addition to the genre: it is both knowing, in a literary sense, and entertaining, and makes profitable use of its influences. Gracefully written, diligently and rewardingly researched, it is both exciting and funny. It takes the cliches of the genre and makes them sexy and freshly interesting'
Observer

Gripping ... slumming it doesn't get much better than this (Time Out)

I simply could put it down, couldn't stop until I'd finished it. It tooke me right back to the times and brought back the fear - the real cold fear - of the period (Terry O'Neill, 60s photographer)

'Done so cannily that it virtually winks at you'
The Sunday Times

Jake Arnott has created a gangster story every bit as cool, stylish and venomous as the London in which it is set, an English original as sharp and lethal as a Savile Row lapel (Independent on Sunday)

'Very funny, oddly touching, and unobtrusively perceptive"
Evening Standard

'Truly fascinating ... Arnott's ability to powerfully resurrect an era ... is astonishing. A great read'
Guardian

Arnott's creation of the decadent, dangerous atmosphere of the times is immaculate. His prose is as smooth as a seersucker suit, as sweet as a purple heart. Suck it and see (Observer)

As polished as a brass knuckleduster...strong-arm stuff, which zings with an authentic low-life argot and grips the reader with its head-in-a-vice portrait of the ugly glamour of the era (Sunday Times)

'The sort of well-crafted prose that calls attention not to itself and its own cleverness but to the compelling plot...in short, its ace and if you try to tell me it's not already being made into a Pulp Fiction meets Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells style caper with Ray Winstone in the lead role, why, I simply won't believe you.' James Melville, Cherwell

London. The 1960s. The capital is swinging, but underneath the boomtown there's a dark underbelly. Meet Harry Starks: club owner, racketeer, porn king, sociology graduate and keen Judy Garland fan. Harry's business is fronting violence with rough charm and cheap glamour; putting the frighteners on, performing menace while trying to desperately trying to jump the counter into legitimacy.

Five characters tell five tales that combine in an extraordinary narrative that is both an explosively paced thriller and brilliantly imagined sociological and topographical portrait of sixties London.