Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes (1914–1976) was a British novelist best known for his London trilogy – City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr Love and Justice (1960) – which captured the underworld, youth culture, and racial complexity of post-war London with a directness that contemporary literary fiction largely avoided.

MacInnes was born in London but spent much of his childhood in Australia, returning to England in his twenties. He was a grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and a son of the novelist Angela Thirkell, family connections he wore lightly and discussed rarely. He was bisexual – his relationships with men, particularly young Black men in the Notting Hill and Soho scenes, are documented in his biography and reflected obliquely in his fiction.

Absolute Beginners, set in Soho and Notting Hill during the summer of the 1958 race riots, is his most celebrated novel. Its narrator moves through a world of jazz clubs, coffee bars, sex workers, and queer men with an unsentimental ease that made the book feel radical at the time and still readable today. The Dilly and the streets around Piccadilly Circus are present in his non-fiction essays as a world he knew well from the inside. His collected essays, England, Half English (1961), remain vivid portraits of a country trying to understand what it was becoming.

MacInnes died in 1976. Absolute Beginners was filmed in 1986, to mixed reviews. His reputation has fluctuated – he is neither as celebrated as he was in his lifetime nor as forgotten as he has sometimes been claimed to be. As a bisexual writer who documented the gay and Black worlds of 1950s London without prurience or condescension, his place in LGBT literary history is well established.