A visitor to London should get into the whole experience, so why not pick up a book about to read during your stay? Some are very well-known; Charles Dickens used many of the most disreputable parts of London in his novels, based on his own investigations as a journalist and social reformer. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes are also famous for their London settings, but this link to Jeff Cotton’s great website will provide some useful suggestions and reviews.

www.fictionalcities.co.uk/london.htm

Although Fictional Cities has a long list of London books, here are a few others worth looking at:

Agatha Christie: One Two, Buckle my Shoe

Hercule Poirot’s dentist is found dead from a gunshot wound and the official verdict is suicide. Poirot suspects there is more to the case than is at first evident.

Charles Dickens: Gone Astray

"When I was a very small boy…I got lost in the City of London." A glimpse of London in the 1820s, this autobiographical tale was drawn from memories some 30 years after the event.

Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones’s Diary

Bridget’s story began as a column in The Independent newspaper. The highs and lows of her year set down the lighter side of despair, self-doubt and obsession.

Kate Griffin: A Madness of Angels

This London fantasy suggests that our capital has curious and magical hidden depths. Sorcerer Matthew Swift is reborn into a mysterious world with beings of power.

Cynthia Harnett: The Load of Unicorn

Children’s fiction. William Caxton had trouble obtaining paper for his new-fangled printing press it seems, from this tale of his apprentice.

Dorothy L Sayers: Murder Must Advertise

From 1922 to 1931 Sayers worked as a copywriter at S. H. Benson's advertising agency in London. A fictional advertising agency office, Pym’s Publicity, provides the setting for this murder mystery.

Anya Seyton: Katherine

A fictional retelling of the period of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, based on the true-life story of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-law.