Paul French
Crime and the City: Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight
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Portsmouth – known to the locals as “Pompey” – is, and has been for centuries, England’s largest Royal Navy base, 75 miles south of London in the country of Hampshire. Home to two-thirds of the UK’s surface naval fleet and with a reputation you might expect of a town filled to the gills with sailors….
Crime and the City: Monte Carlo
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How could there not be a lot of crime in Monaco – a tightly packed nest of wealth, sex and power all in the sunshine of the Riviera. Officially the Principality of Monaco, with its main conurbation being Monte Carlo, set between France and Italy on the Mediterranean. Roughly 40,000 residents of whom about 10,000…
Crime and the City: Las Vegas
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Let’s go to Las Vegas with one of the great kings of the American hard-boiled Charles Willeford in his novel Wicked Wives (1956): ‘Once the sun comes up in the desert it rises fast. It hung on the horizon like a solid neon pumpkin, beaming through our windshield. It grew warmer all the time. The…
Crime and the City: Hamburg
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I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Hamburg is a rather underrated German city. Berlin and Munich get the crowds, Frankfurt the money, and Hamburg gets a bit overlooked. But not by crime fans as Hamburg has a long history of being, shall we say, a bit sleazy? It’s a port city (always…
Port-au-Prince: Crime Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Soul
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Haiti has never been an easy place to live. From colonialism to liberation by the ex-slave revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture at the start of the nineteenth century – the largest slave uprising since Spartacus – it’s been a country wracked by violence, foreign interference, and division. A country that seemingly has no luck – dictators,…