King Solomon's Carpet
The fifth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 1991
I was sitting in the tube one day and it suddenly struck me to write a novel with a history of the London underground, and I got quite excited. I was running up and down the carriage looking at things. Looking out of the window at an impenetrable tunnel.
Jarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compiling his obsessive, secret history of London’s Underground.
His presence and his strange house draw a band of misfits into his orbit: young Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper, who gets his kicks on the tube; and mysterious Axel, whose dark secret later casts a shadow over all of their lives.
Notes
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger.
Dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Nick Fisher in 1996.
A Good Read: Kingsley Amis and Ruth Rendell discuss four paperbacks by Dick Francis, Paul Auster, G.M. Fraser and Anthony Trollope.
Contemporary Reads 2
John Bossy - Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair
Frances Fyfield - Deep Sleep
Rohinton Mistry - Such a Long Journey
Penelope Lively - City of the Mind
Ben Okri - The Famished Road
Jung Chang - Wild Swans