KEEP ON (BOW STREET) RUNNING!

They were the original thin blue line, created by Henry Fielding to police crime-ridden 18th-century London. Now the Tom Jones author has been brought back to life in a dazzling new novel set against the backdrop of the tricksters and gulls of Georgian England

- By Laura Shepherd-Robinson

HAVE several crime writer friends who were policemen or lawyers before they turned their experiences into fiction. But the man responsible for creating Britain's first police force did it the other way round. Henry Fielding was one of the 18th century's most celebrated novelists, author of Tom Jones and many other bestselling books and plays.

But later in life, he became the chief magistrate of Westminster and the founder of the first incarnation of the famed Bow Street Runners - Britain's first roving constables.

Fielding is a character in my new novel, The Art of a Lie, in which he investigates the murder of a Piccadilly confectioner - the husband of my main character, Hannah Cole.

And frankly, the London of Henry Fielding and Hannah Cole was a dangerous place.

We might worry about crime and lawlessness now, but the capital of the present has nothing on its Georgian predecessor.

A lack of street lighting meant most roads were in total darkness at night. Dingy alleys and courtyards were the haunt of thieves, and dusk became known as "the footpad hour". Sometimes, robbers would block a street at both ends, beat anyone trapped there unconscious, before stealing everything they owned - sometimes even their clothes. Pickpocketing was rife, highwaymen made travel perilous and people were frequently attacked in their own homes - raped, beaten and robbed.

Sometimes gangs of criminals would raid prisons and watch houses, either to break their friends out of jail, or just to kill the local constables and watchmen.

The criminal justice "system" was wholly unfit to deal with this threat, having evolved haphazardly since the middle ages. Magistrates were responsible for the pursuit, arrest and imprisonment of criminals and often their prosecution, too. They selected local citizens by lot to serve as constables, meaning most were both unpaid and unwilling.