Beneath the Streets

Adam Macqueen

When Jeremy Thorpe hired thugs to kill his ex-lover, they botched it. What if they had succeeded?

‘As boldly conceived as it is vividly realised’ John Preston

LONGLISTED: Polari Prize

It is February 1976, and the naked corpse of a shockingly underage rent boy is fished out of a pond on Hampstead Heath. Since the police don’t seem to care, twenty-year-old Tommy Wildeblood – himself a former ‘Dilly boy’ prostitute – finds himself investigating.

Dodging murderous Soho hoodlums and the agents of a more sinister power, Tommy uncovers another, even more shocking crime: the Liberal leader and likely next Home Secretary, Jeremy Thorpe, has had his former male lover executed on Exmoor and got clean away with it. Now the trail of guilt seems to lead higher still, and a ruthless Establishment will stop at nothing to cover its tracks.

In a gripping thriller whose cast of real-life characters includes Prime Minister Harold Wilson, his senior adviser Lady Falkender, gay Labour peer Tom Driberg and the investigative journalist Paul Foot, Adam Macqueen plays ‘what if’ with Seventies political history – with a sting in the tail that reminds us that the truth can be just as chilling as fiction.

‘A wonderfully evocative walk on the wild side of 1970s London, Beneath the Streets is darkly comic and deeply moving. A breathtaking, heartbreaking thriller’ Jake Arnott

‘A gripping thriller, interwoven with a really important thread about the condition of being gay in the 1970s’ Harriett Gilbert, A Good Read, BBC Radio 4

‘As a portrait of a world I thought it was really fantastic. I was constantly shocked and amazed by how much of this is true’ David Nicholls

‘This very English scandal has wit and invention to spare’ The Observer

‘Skilfully mixes fact with fiction’ Mail on Sunday

‘What if Jeremy Thorpe had succeeded in murdering Norman Scott? That’s the gripping premise behind this smart story of corruption, murder and establishment cover-up’ The i Paper, 40 best books of the year

‘Ticks all the boxes for me. Gay history. Jeremy Thorpe. And a rent boy turned detective called Tommy Wildeblood. Fantastic’ Jonathan Harvey

‘You think you know how mental the 1970s was? This book will remind you that it was even more insane than that’ Helen Lewis

‘A page-turning mystery, skilfully plotted and filled with tension’ Paul Burston

Paperback: 384pp

Published: Lightning (April 2020)

ISBN: 9781785631733