CATHI UNSWORTH

‘My third novel is republished by Strange Attractor Press, by Mark Pilkington, whom I met working for . directly relates to and . It is an evocation of a crime that really did happen – the ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of West London between 1959-65. Eight women were killed, their naked bodies left in and along the Thames. It sparked the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history but was never solved. When David Peace recommended I read David Seabrook’s true crime account, , I realised Ladbroke Grove, my home of the past thirty years, was the central location. Now the home of multi-millionaire bankers and oligarchs, in 1959 you could expect to find: “,” according to resident Colin MacInnes in , published that year. Trying to make sense of what happened by re-evoking that world ushered me into the same darkness Derek Raymond experienced writing . But it led me to some inspirational types who were sharing the cheap rooms of W11 then, including students at the Royal College of Art, an institution central to Michael