Joe Thomas

Joe Thomas turns late 1970s and early 1980s Hackney into a charged meeting place of politics, music, journalism, and policing in White Riot. Arcadia Books introduced this work during 2023, and it opens a planned United Kingdom Trilogy continued by Red Menace. Detective Constable Patrick Noble and photographer Suzi Scialfa move through overlapping investigations while Rock Against Racism, the National Front, institutional prejudice, and the Winter of Discontent reshape London around them. Thomas draws on archival material, testimony, and newspaper reporting, then places fictional characters beside figures to examine how official narratives are made and challenged. The book extends his interest in cities and political power after the São Paulo quartet and Bent, but its punk-era soundtrack gives this London story a different rhythm. Reviews have described it as crime fiction that blends fact with invention. Its strongest author-book connection lies in Thomas's attention to Hackney, where he grew up, and to the competing versions of history embedded in streets, photographs, music, and police records.