Sophie Gee

So that's the first thing I really want to say is the way in which the city has changed from the aftermath of the First War to the aftermath of the Second War.

The other thing I want to say, just picking up on the Dickens thing for a second, I read the opening of Bleak House.

But the other Dickens novel that this really reminds me of is Oliver Twist because it has that same dichotomy or sort of toggling between the underworld of Fagin and his gang of thieves and the upper class world of the other characters.

And then, of course, they intersect.

And what Dickens, I think, is tracking in Fagin and the gang is the sort of long tail, the long aftermath of agricultural reform, enclosure, the loss of common land, the loss of the sort of ability to...

have a kind of local sustained existence in an older version of England.

And there's this kind of enormous vagrant migrant population of dispossessed rural workers who are kind of roaming around England as a country.

And that kind of arising of this substructure of criminality, petty criminality in London is,

is the kind of long tail of misdirected agricultural reform and the sort of loss of dignity and identity for the rural working classes, which, of course, is a kind of idealisation in a different way.

But I think that Allingham's gang reflects that same kind of displacement and migrant identity that Dickens is getting at in Oliver Twist.

That's a brilliant point.

Brilliant.

Can you read that for us, Jonathan?

Or Jackson Lamb, back on horses for a moment.

That is such a good point.

I love that because that's exactly what's happening.

And then the question is sort of what's going to become possible once you take the aristocratic sleuth out of the picture, once Sherlock Holmes can no longer crack the problem, what happens?

And what happens, I suppose, Jonty, is that it turns into a kind of cat and mouse game, a story of a kind of emerging deep pattern of people

Tragedy and dysfunction and kind of connections that nobody saw coming, all of which kind of culminate in this, you know, very filmic finish in the great house in France, which had belonged to Elginbrode's, Meg's first, the missing husband's family.

Yes.