Neil Root – författare

LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 2026‘A fascinating and meticulously researched look at the biggest gay scandal to hit the headlines until Oscar Wilde. Absolutely a must-read.’ – Paul Donnelley, author of 501 Most Notorious CrimesIt’s the summer of 1889, and the royal family is in crisis.It is well known in polite society that the Prince of Wales’s eldest son and his aristocratic acolytes are regulars at 19 Cleveland Street – a male brothel in London’s West End. Bad behaviour by the gentry is accepted, but it must stay behind closed doors; they can do what they wish, but the rule that rules all is silence. The Establishment has always closed ranks – a word here and there from powerful people will put rumours swiftly to bed.But not this time.Onto this stage walks Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard, fresh from leading the disastrous Jack the Ripper investigation the previous year. Now the reputations of men who rule half the world are under threat from a scandal that stretches all the way to the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

They were an elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters covering the most notorious British crime between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. It was an era in which murder dominated the front and inside pages of the newspapers – the ‘golden age’ of tabloid crime. Members of the Murder Gang knew one another well. They drank together in the same Fleet Street pubs, but they were also ruthlessly competitive in pursuit of the latest scoop. It was said that when the Daily Express covered a big murder story they would send four cars: one containing their reporters, the other three to block the road at crime scenes to stop other rivals getting through. As a matter of course, Murder Gang members listened in to police radios, held clandestine meetings with killers on the run, made huge payments to murderers and their families – and jammed potatoes into their rivals’ exhaust pipes so their cars wouldn’t start. These were just the tools of the trade; it was a far cry from modern reporting. Here, Neil Root delves into their world, examining some of the biggest crime stories of the era and the men who wrote them. In turns fascinating, shocking and comical, this tale of true crime, media and social history will have you turning the pages as if they were those newspapers of old.

The Metropolitan Police of the mid-twentieth century, in particular The Flying Squad and Obscene Publications Squad, has been described as ‘the most routinely corrupt organisation in London’. Larger-than-life characters such as Ken Drury and Alfred ‘Wicked Bill’ Moody routinely fraternised with underworld figures, paid off witnesses and struck dodgy deals to get their man – regardless of whether he was innocent or guilty. And the problem went far beyond a couple of ‘bent’ coppers: in the end, fifty officers were prosecuted, while 478 took early retirement.Using Metropolitan Police files obtained under Freedom of Information, which have not been accessed since the 1970s, author Neil Root can finally tell the real story of how the Met became systemically corrupt, and how Sir Robert Mark, who became commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1972, finally cleaned it up.

Peter Rachman dominated housing in post-war London - he owned vast swathes in the west of the city, accumulating huge wealth as his tenants lived in squalor and fear of his hard-nosed collectors and enforcers. He was also at the heart of the city's murky, post-war underworld.In Slumlord, Neil Root pulls back the curtain on this seedy world to paint a portrait of a fascinating man whose path intersected with figures as diverse as Christine Keeler, the glamorous society girl at the heart of the Profumo Scandal, and Michael X, the Black Power activist who later went on to be hanged for double murder.Ruthless in his ambition, Rachman was the archetype of the exploitative landlord, and a man who was willing to use the prejudices of his time in order to maximise profits. He is also a compelling leading man in a story of post-war London, a city where, among the grime and the rubble, fortunes could be made. You just had to hold your nose, abandon your morals and be willing to take from those less fortunate.