Avant Noir!

Readings from: Toby Litt, Cathi Unsworth, Courttia Newland + more tbc
Visuals from: Huzzah Noir!
Music from: Led Bib
A night of new fiction, comic art and music of a darker hue, a world where lunch is drunk from the bottle and murder smells like honeysuckle. On Toynbee Theatre’s velvet auditorium and black art-deco stage, four authors present a selection of bleeding-edge crime stories, intercut with animated chapters of collaborative neo-comic noir from Huzzah Noir, an neo-noir web-comic written daily and collaboratively by a selection of the best comic talent around. Young British jazz scene standard bearers and 2009 Mercury Nominees Led Bib provide improvisations and composed ideas, putting on to simmer a suitably hard-boiled soundtrack underneath and around this multi-textured event.
Journeyman author and journalist Toby Litt reads from his forthcoming crime novel King Death. Darting between dingy student pubs, the roofs of Borough Market and the corridors and car-parks of Guy’s Hospital, it’s a mystery set in the world of young medical students. A human heart found on the tube leads two young investigators on a trail that leads to the hospital’s infamous dissection lecturer – known behind his back as ‘King Death’.
Cathi Unsworth, editor of London Noir, reads from her new novel. Set against the background of 1960s London, Bad Penny Blues plums the murky depths of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders in which the bodies of eight working girls were found in or along the Thames. Sixties London explodes in all its ferocious colour, with fascists and Teds, migrants and constable Pete Bradley caught in the middle. A tender paean to the city, a novel with a twisted mystery at its heart.
West London native Courttia Newland delights in the dark and the uncanny. Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies, to Roald Dahl, to everyday life in West London, Newland brings together the literary and the popular in a reading from his collection of grotesque short stories, Music for the Off-Key. Stylish classic pulp-fiction given a modern, capital twist.
smart noir entertainment with the bitter aftertaste of truth The Financial Times on Bad Penny Blues

The future of jazz The Times on Led Bib

Commissioned and produced by London Word Festival

Also as part of London Word Festival, please see The Chip Shop