I picked up Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor as an entry on David Bowie’s essential top 100 books – and I am so glad I did. I have heard nothing about this author, and what a treat it was to read this obsessive mystery novel about poverty, history, murder, architecture, and how coded occultism and superstition, as well as the echoing curse of death, can inject itself so deeply and linger for centuries in the history of a city. 

Ackroyd seems like one of those authors with a local flavour – particula...