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[Gerald Kersh] was buried by a bomb during the Second World War but bounced back as a quicksilver talent, writing short stories for the Evening News one day, producing character sketches, columns, articles and radio scripts the next. His wonderful short stories - which included a tale about a pilot who ages backwards and the Mona Lisa smiling to hide her bad teeth - were sometimes accepted as factually accurate. In these tales, which embraced every possible genre, resided his fame. But he should really have been lauded for Fowler's End, about a venal, hilariously Falstaffian cinema owner. Most critics ignored this masterpiece, although the ever-perceptive Anthony Burgess called it one of the century's finest comic novels.

New independent publisher London Books aims to publish old and new fiction written on ''the real London of everyday men and women''. In republishing the twice-filmed Night and the City, it has revived a distinctive, authentic portrait of the 1930s London underclass.

The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid creation: Soho pimp (or \"ponce\", as the term was then) Harry Fabian. A dapper dresser armed with a fake American accent, and a tenacious finagler in all corners of the W1 petty-crime universe, Fabian is arguably the most finely drawn sharp-suited hoodlum of inter-war England. (The main rivals? Graham Greene's Pinkie in Brighton Rock, or maybe James Curtis's Kennedy in The Gilt Kid.) And though it's never fully spelled out in Kersh's effusive prose, Fabian is an ethnically radical character too: with a name like that, we know he's supposed to be Jewish. But Fabian is a long way from the earnest, poverty-stricken, fresh-off-the-boat characters in books such as Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto Kersh's novel eventually joined other examples of \"lowlife\" writing in bargain bins across the land. Urban archaeologists and psychogeographers, however, never lost sight of it, and in recent years Night and the City has joined a flotilla of defiantly indigenous novels as a treasured, and marketable, corner of the cult publishing world. Kersh's current standing owes much to frequent mention in the work of Iain Sinclair, whose interest in east London novelists has led him naturally to Jewish writers such as Alexander Baron (The Lowlife), Emanuel Litvinoff (Journey Through a Small Planet) and Simon Blumenfeld (Jew Boy) and onwards towards Kersh. But Kersh is not of the school of Hackney and Bethnal Green, and Night and the City has little in common with other Jewish immigrant chronicles of rage and despair; it has much more affinity with British pulp literature of the 30s and 40s. James Curtis, Richard Llewellyn and Graham Greene in his \"entertainment\" phase are Kersh's closest cousins, delineating an argot-heavy world of petty crime, class conflict and bruising, street-smart morality. The novel becomes a gateway into that much-mythicised landscape of modern London: the Soho of sex shops and gang wars.

We are always happy when we find another story by one of our favorite writers-Mr. [Gerald Kersh]. The Secret Masters has the usual free style and suspense which characterize other Kersh tales.

The story: Soho wideboy Harry Fabian is the protagonist of a story set during the run-up to George VI's coronation in 1937. Accoutred with a fake American accent, flashy suits and a prostitute girlfriend, Fabian develops a scheme to promote wrestling, by persuading a retired veteran, Ali the Terrible Turk, to take on the Greek wrestler Kration. He also entices a club hostess, Helen, away from her sculptor boyfriend. But Fabian's wrestling scheme unravels when Ali dies shortly after the bout, and, chronically short of cash, he plans to sell his girl to a \"white slaver\". Before he can put any more schemes into action, however, Fabian is arrested as part of a pre-coronation clean-up.

A 1699 version of bawdy London is splendidly brought to life in Fidelis Morgan's The Rival Queens (HarperCollins, pounds 9.99), the second rollicking novel to feature the wiles and conniving intrigues of Countess Ashby de la Zouche and her maidservant Alpiew. Scavenging for scandal and with the bailiffs in hot pursuit, the hardy pair seek refuge in a philosophical lecture at the York Buildings Concert Hall, only to witness one of the players stagger on to the stage, dripping with the blood of a decapitation. With suspects galore, our unlikely sleuths pursue their quarry from the Tower of London to Bedlam, with a detour to the wilds of Wapping. Restoration comedy and action, artifice, gunpowder and Samuel Pepys: a perfect historical menu of crime and mystery, with the bonus of laughs aplenty.

Andrew Pulver's \"Night and the City,\" a study of Jules Dassin's 1950 film which was adapted from a 1938 novel by Gerald Kersh, is reviewed (BFI/Palgrave).