James Davis delivers a gritty Noir tale with his newest release called Noho. The novel takes place in Soho, London sometime in the 1930's. His character Nick Valentine takes us right into the seedy sections and leads us on a world wind tour as he attempts to solve a murder, protect his dame and figure out who the good guys are. Noho is a good, old-fashioned hardboiled thriller.
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When a dead dancing girl with all the wrong connections is found with Nick Valentine’s name scrawled on a scrap of paper in her pocket, life gets complicated for the disgraced Great War hero. Unwillingly drawn into a web of espionage and crime in the underbelly of 1930’s London, Nick soon discovers that who killed her may be less important than why. With British Intelligence leaning on Nick to use his underworld connections to investigate the girl’s killing, it soon becomes clear that there’s more to the murder than meets the eye. Nick soon finds himself at odds not just with the authorities, but on the wrong side of Soho’s gangland bosses and pursued by a foreign spy ring. Trawling Fitzrovia and Soho’s demi-monde of clubs, cabarets and pubs for answers, Nick realises that the stakes go beyond national security, and that no one can be trusted. As the net closes and the case draws to an increasingly bloody conclusion, Nick is left to tie up the loose ends at a terrible personal cost. This dark and brooding thriller lifts the covers on a fascinating 1930s’ London few know, while the plot’s twists and turns keep the reader guessing right up to the final page.
Meet The Author: James Davis
A keen writer since early childhood, whilst studying psychology at college James continued to write, both fiction and increasingly, commentary and opinion on the burgeoning dance music scene. It was perhaps inevitable that after university James would end up spending his nights hunched over a keyboard in a squat in London's Fitzrovia, scratching a living from writing freelance magazine commissions whilst working on his fiction.These formative years are a key inspiration for the setting of Noho. Journalistic success of sorts beckoned and in 1997 after a spell travelling the US James had a short story published in a travel anthology, Travellers Tales From Heaven and Hell, (Eye Books, 1997) and his freelance work led to him joining the legendary Ministry of Sound club as part of the team that launched Ministry magazine. Contributions to The Face, Mixmag, Seven, The UK Club Guide, Metro, The Times and many more were to follow. Whilst professionally James became increasingly involved in the commercial side of the fast developing digital media business, working in senior roles for Warner Bros, News International and MTV, among others, his passion for writing never diminished.
He continued to fill his spare time crafting novels and observing London's demi-monde of nightclubs, boozers and cabarets, developing a passion for Art Deco style and burlesque, as well as a taste for Martinis. A keen traveller, James now splits his time between London and Ibiza and is married. He spends his spare time reading, writing and doing his best to stay in shape. Noho is his debut novel, but certainly not his last.
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More About James:
What inspired you to become a writer? I’ve loved writing since childhood. I used to write short stories as a child, and was always starting novels, but never getting beyond the first twenty or so pages! Through school and university fiction writing took a back seat to assignments, but I picked it up again and started writing in earnest in my early twenties. It’s just something I love. Does your location inspire you? Ibiza definitely inspires - but it also distracts - it’s so beautiful, and there’s so much going on. I have the seed of an idea for a novel set in Ibiza that I keep jotting ideas down on at the moment... How much does the level of creativity that exists on the island motivate your writing? What’s great about the island is that there is so much creativity here across so many different fields: music, art, fashion, it’s definitely inspiring and seeing other people creating does drive you forward. Do you have plans to follow up Noho and if so, can you tell us about them? Definitely! As I said, I have an idea about a novel set in Ibiza, I’ve got some ideas jotted down for the second Noho, and I actually already have a short story prequel, Valentine in Paris, that I wrote while in Ibiza, out on Kindle. On top of that, I’m reworking a gritty urban London thriller and working on a non-fiction title that I hope to have some news on later in the year. Prioritising and finding time is my problem at the moment, but I hope to have another fiction novel out this year.
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