Blacklisting, firestarting, scapegoating, sensationalizing. Bent coppers and liquid lawyers, heedless hedonism and crony capitalism, moral panics and wild parties, antisemitism tolerated and fascism fashionable, with a fightback well under way: 1920s London had a lot in common with 2020s London. Where Dope Girls took us into the opium dens and all-night bars of post-WW1 Soho, Who By Fire will take us into the raging fires and fat insurance payouts of Shoreditch and beyond, and introduce us to a memorable cast of chancers, cheats and corrupt coppers in a world recovering from – and anticipating – a pandemic, financial precarity, and war.

The tale Patrick Wright intends to tell in Who By Fire is a tale of the 1920s for our times. Patrick has gone, as he always does, deep into unsealed files and dusty archives, down rough roads and into forgotten parlours, collaring fading gentry and elderly street-fighters, to assemble afresh a tale notorious in its season and worthy of being notorious and cautionary all over again. It is a tale of aristocratic arson and East End enterprise, of the English establishment at its most self-serving and slippery, of the immigrant community too often then as now attributed with devilish designs and made scapegoats by conspiracists and constabulary alike. At its centre are two men of charisma and chutzpah, one a legendary Fire Fiend, the other the most celebrated investigator of the time: Leopold Harris, the Jewish fire insurance assessor who would claim to be carrying out his own righteous war against the corruption and bigotry of the post-war police and insurance industry, and William Crocker, the forensic solicitor employed by the insurers to investigate Harris’s’ ‘conspiracy'. The pair of adversaries dart and duck, each striving to outmanoeuvre the other, masters both of subterfuge and surveillance, until with all the force of the law behind him Crocker finally manages to put Harris in the dock, prosecute, and convict him. But once behind bars, Harris proves even more dangerous, especially to the Establishment that he feels has abandoned him…