The Stratford Murder by Mike Hollow (best thriller novels of all time .TXT) 📗

of St Thomas’s Hospital in 1940 also took place as described in the book – and lest anyone be troubled by my version of the name, I plead that I have relied on E. M. McInnes’s 1963 history of the hospital, which says that the name St Thomas’ Hospital was officially adopted in 1948 but traditionally the more usual form before that was St Thomas’s.

Other real-life events inspired elements of the story, all of them occurring on K Division of the Metropolitan Police, where Detective Inspector Jago is based. Three men were arrested and tried for explosives offences after police raided a house in Manor Park (part of the County Borough of East Ham) in 1939 and found various items of bomb-making equipment, while significant breakthroughs in the prevention of terrorist bomb attacks were made in Ilford and Dagenham.

It’s worth noting too, for any readers wondering, that the Kibbo Kift, the Social Credit Party and the Greenshirts were all real organisations.

I’m indebted to Frank Chester, who served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant on the Arctic convoys and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Frank’s pin-sharp memories of life in London before the war and at sea during it were of great help, and to me all the more remarkable given that when he shared them with me he had already celebrated his hundredth birthday.

As always I’m grateful to Roy Ingleton for his help on police matters, and as always too I could not have got to the end of another book without the constant support and encouragement of my wife, Margaret, and my children, Catherine and David.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Hollow was born in West Ham, on the eastern edge of London, and grew up in Romford, Essex. He studied Russian and French at the University of Cambridge and then worked for the BBC and later Tearfund. In 2002 he went freelance as a copywriter, journalist, editor and translator, but now gives all his time to writing the Blitz Detective books.

blitzdetective.com      @MikeHollowBlitz

By Mike Hollow

The Blitz Detective series

The Blitz Detective

The Canning Town Murder

The Custom House Murder

The Stratford Murder

The Dockland Murder

COPYRIGHT

Allison & Busby Limited

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London W1F 8AN

allisonandbusby.com

First published by Lion Hudson as Firing Line in 2018.

This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2020.

Copyright © 2018 by Mike Hollow

The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–0–7490–2608–0