But for almost 20 years, Ackroyd, who is only 42 years old, has managed to make his way in London's jealous, insular literary world with careless aplomb.

Of course, some people just watch their step. at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done 'One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. 'There are two types of people, you see,' he continued. Wandering down the narrow sidewalks - past low 17th- and 18th-century dwellings and shops working warehouses, their raw corrugated fences erodedīy the river damp a mossy vacant lot a derelict mineral-water works a bow-fronted unisex hair salon - he spoke expansively of 'some need of my nature for a primal or tribal atmosphere.' 'The mystery has left the place and gone into the book,' he said flatly.īut the surrounding district, in all its radiant decay, clearly engages him as it has since he was a boy. Anne's impassive northwest face, now glazed in acid sunlight, Ackroyd seemed subdued. Sitting on a bench in the graveyard flanking St. His blood sacrifices at their sites seep into the 20th-century passages to undo a detective named Nicholas Hawksmoor, a desperate exponent of empiricism and the law. Nicholas Dyer, a demented creature of the plague and the fire. In the 18th-century scenes of Ackroyd's book, these edifices are designed and built by a fictional architect named Then we went deep into East London, following streets half-familiar to me from Ackroyd's phantasmal 1985 novel, 'Hawksmoor,' to a succession of archaic stone churches built in a restoration project after the Great Fire of London by theĪrchitect Nicholas Hawksmoor: Christ Church, Spitalfields St.

'I think it might have been a plague pit. 'This place was called Bone Hill even before it was a cemetery,' A cold, low-lying mist drifted among the plots and monuments. We went first to a place called Bunhill Fields and walked over the grave of William Blake, whose biography he is writing. The streets of the city he calls 'an area of, or an arena for, the past.' PETER ACKROYD, A SOLID, prosperous-looking man with incandescent blue eyes and the sweetly brutal charm of a brilliant character actor, left his penthouse on Notting Hill in London to take me down into The New York Times: Book Review Search Articleĭecember 22, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

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