I have been thinking of how many novels have been written using a Black London Cab Driver as its main protagonist, and the answer as far I could ascertain is surprisingly few.

The Devil’s in the Detail by Matthew S. Wilson

David Shepherd awakes in a cell. The middle-aged London cab driver has vague recollections of attempting to protect his female passenger from a gang of drunken youths. Patchy flash-backs of blood and screams leave him with the ominous feeling that he may have done something rather quite rash. Did he kill one of the attackers?

This question is answered by the matter-of-fact Olivia, who assures him that this isn’t jail and that David hasn’t murdered anyone. His relief is short-lived when Olivia also reveals herself to be an Angel and that David is, in fact, in Purgatory. It appears that there was one fatality the previous night: him.

And so begins the Trial of David Shepherd in the Court of Saint Peter. A court that is presided over by Angels prosecuted by Demons and ultimately judged by a soul’s adherence to the Ten Commandments.

The Devil’s in the Detail is a religious satire, for atheists, agnostics and believers alike. It poses questions that we will all one day ponder: How are the actions we take in this life, ultimately judged? What constitutes a good life? What does it really take to pass through the Pearly Gates? As David tries to answer these questions he will discover that sometimes . . . The Devil’s in the Detail.

Black Cabs by John McLaren

John McLaren has sold the film rights to Black Cabs. Using three London cabbies as his protagonists, the uncompromising picture of London life on both sides of the river is idiosyncratic and astringent.

When three cabbies attempt to make a killing on the stock market by eavesdropping on the plans of a corporate magnate to engineer a huge take-over, they find they have taken on the sinister might of international banking community. The beleaguered heroes, Len, Terry and Einstein, soon find the sharp suits they are up against have no scruples about using extreme violence to protect their interests – a top financial executive is discovered dead in the back of a cab, and the boys are forced to investigate a monumental cover-up. A further turn of the screw is provided by Len’s desperation for the money–on which his daughter’s life depends.

That Angel Look by Mike Ripley

This is Mike Ripley’s eighth novel featuring itinerant trumpet player Fitzroy Maclean Angel who despite being bright, articulate, University-educated and a worldly-wise musician, spends most of his time driving a black cab. Welcome to London in the 1990s on the cusp of the Internet revolution.

When Angel is asked to assist in a leg judging contest, unlike most of the gawking men that surround them, Angel proves to be a smart strategist and lets the right one win as he tells her on the way home. Angel starts a relationship and is soon taken on as her driver (he owns his own de-licensed black cab). Angel tries to help the business, and impress his new girlfriend, by setting up a photoshoot but this ends in disaster when the photographer is found stabbed in the brain. This puts Angel on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from detectives Stokoe and Sell who, when not trying out their sub-Abbot and Costello patter, are content to point Angel in the wrong direction and see what emerges from the troubles he will stir up. This turns out to be considerable as the story combines illegal sweatshops, a witch’s coven, the kidnapping of a drug dealer, blackmail, resurgent European fascism, turf warfare between Turks and Bangladeshis as well as the solution to just who killed the sleazy photographer.

The Book of Dave by Will Self

When cabdriver Dave Rudman’s wife of five years deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, he is thrown into a tailspin of doubt and discontent. Fearing his son will never know his father, Dave pens a gripping text–part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of ‘The Knowledge’. Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Five hundred years later, the ‘Book of Dave’ is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet. Rising sea levels have turned Britain into an archipelago. Small, isolated communities struggle with nature and ideology, their lives a harsh idyll mediated by the Book. The inhabitants of the tiny island of Ham grow wheat and harvest gulls’ eggs from the stacks in the bay. The men, or ‘dads’, live on one side of the village, the women, or ‘mums’, on the other. The children stay with their mums for half the week, and with their dads for the other; after each Changeover it’s as if the kids are ‘other people altogether’. The dads pass on the Knowledge, and along with it their maleness, which consists of screwing the ‘opares’, or teenage girls, and abusing the ‘boilers’, women wrecked by childbirth. The women don’t get much chance to pass anything on, being too busy pulling the island’s only plough. The language of the Book mediates this savagely satirical transfer of taxi-driver values. Dads wear ‘bubbery car coats’; the generic word for food is ‘curry’; when you make an opare pregnant, the bargain you enter into is known as ‘child support’. Language also constructs the Hamsters’ natural world: the young of the motos are known as ‘mopeds’; by day the ‘headlight’ rules the sky, while at night, when the headlight is dipped, you see the ‘dashboard’ laid out in stars. Such conceits are worked into the text with obsessive care.

The Great Satan by David Black

The author David Black was a part-time SAS Special Forces soldier working as a London Black Cabbie, ready to be called into action in times of national emergency. In the Great Satan his main character, Pat Farrell, is so close to the author as to be synonymous. The principal difference is that the author is now retired from the forces, while his fictional counterpart is left to content with the real world with direct relevance to the grisly global horrors being perpetuated today. In the bitterly divisive aftermath of the Iraq War, the former political leaders of the UK and USA were condemned as deceitful and mendacious, allegedly fabricating excuses for their martial actions. In the Great Satan, the first of his new SAS Shadow Squadron series, David Black takes their rationale to its logical conclusion to produce his own fictional nightmare scenario: What if the Iraqi weapons that were said to be dismantled in the late 1990s included the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear bomb? What if the deposing of Saddam Hussein left one of his most ruthless military leaders at large, to profit from the weapon’s sale? And what if his buyers were the terrorist ideologues of al-Qaeda, and home-grown British Jihadists?

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 5th March 2013