Colin MacInnes established his reputation as a new voice in fiction during the late 1950s and early 1960s by introducing fresh subject matter for the serious novel. His London novels investigated the contemporary worlds of immigrant blacks; teenagers who have achieved affluence; prostitutes, pimps, and police. He went on to depict the slave-holding society of the eighteenth century, the Elizabethan underworld and theater, and sociopolitical decline in present-day England. By profession a journalist as well as a novelist, he fused a command of fact with an imaginative apprehension of reality and a strong moral commitment to humanistic values. His distinctive books are not documentaries but original and unsentimental recreations of various subworlds in English culture which skillfully imitate the speech patterns of their inhabitants.

MacInnes was born in South Kensington, London, into an upper-middle-class literary and artistic family. His mother, Angela, class-conscious as her son would never be...