All The Devils Are Here

David Seabrook takes the reader on a deranged exploration of the coast towns of Thanet and the Medway. He fuses his observation of these depressing landscapes - city centres full of unemployed young men, asylum seekers and dodgy characters - with literary and historical associations that seem through his eyes more like bad dreams than heritage advertisements for the local tourist board. He sees the desperate jollity of Margate and Westgate, where T. S. Eliot stayed after the Great War, as a key element in the making of 'The Waste Land'. His Rochester and Chatham crawl with ghosts of Dickens, the parricide of Richard Dadd and the real mystery of Edwin Drood. In Broadstairs, site of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, he uncovers a weird network involving Lord Curzon, Buchan, William Joyce, a famous Nazi con-man and Audrey Hepburn's father. And in Deal he stumbles on a network that touches on the murder of boxer Freddie Mills and the self-destruction of Carry On star Charles Hawtrey while uncovering the true, sordid story behind Robin Maugham's novel The Servant.