“Hawksmoor” by Peter Ackroyd, a long non-fiction favourite of mine, and one I have just reread is a complex novel weaving historical and crime fiction with the supernatural. I have been reading and rereading Iain Sinclair’s back catalogue lately and so prompted to revisit Hawksmoor, a book which owes much to Sinclair and his early work Lud Heat published in 1974.

The story alternates between two timelines: one set in the 18th century with the intriguing Nicholas Dyer, an architect designing churches for Christopher Wren, and the other in the 1980s where Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates a series of murders that seem to connect with Dyer’s churches.

Dyer, a fictional refiguring of the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor is a haunting mix of both genius and devil-worshipping malevolence, his architectural work reflecting his darker intentions and some may find the narrative around him difficult to follow in places. Ackroyd uses old English but perseverance pays off and you have a real sense of deep history embedded in the walls of the churches he created and what went before.

The novel serves as a question around the concept of time where history and modernity are intertwined, suggesting that the past is never truly past with history quite literally repeating itself. This really struck a chord with me, that sense of spirit of place and the hidden stories within the very fabric of our surroundings and the DNA embedded in the stones of our oldest buildings. It reminded me of Alan Moore’s belief that there is no past or present, that everything is happening in the now, that the past never falls into the void but is part of the present and how everyone and everything is intertwined.

Hawksmoor isn’t for everyone, but perseverance can pay off. This is a book of multiple genres, from the historical to the criminal and the supernatural. What is without doubt is the historical accuracy of the text, Ackroyd, now a well respected historian and biographer spent four months studying the subject in the library of the British Museum alone and it shows. Ackroyd brings alive the tawdriness of the times both past and the then present in Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s when the book was published. A decade or so on from when I last read Hawksmoor and the more its central theme revealed itself much like the storyline.