Alexander Baron published over a dozen novels between the late 1940s and the 1970s – winning admiring notices from the likes of V S Pritchett – and had a successful sideline as a scriptwriter. Since his death in 1999, aged eighty-two, many of Baron’s books have come back into print. And yet you’re unlikely to find his name in most surveys of English literature, even those focusing on postwar fiction. In the words of Iain Sinclair, he is one of the ‘reforgotten’ – writers who seem to slip into obscurity again and again.

Sinclair has been singing Baron’s praises since at least the early 1990s and has consistently paid tribute to his 1963 novel, The Lowlife. Baron grew up mainly in the east London borough of Hackney, a recurring subject of Sinclair’s own vast body of writing. In an introduction to this reprint of The Lowlife, Sinclair suggests it was Baron’s luck to capture Hackney at ‘the moment of transition’ – that is, before explosive urban growth and demographic shifts rendered it almost indescribably multiplex. 

The novel’s main character is 45-year-old Harry Boas, who lives in a rented room in a tenement house. A trained garment-presser, he only takes on work when he really has to. ‘I’m a gambler,’ he tells a widowed friend of his sister Debbie, who’s keen to marry him off. Debbie