"We’re still “a city of rebels": Kirkby author launches Georgian crime saga on the Nottingham's128th birthday
Kirkby novelist and screenwriter Alice E Johnson to release new saga set in old Nottingham which she hopes will do for for the city what Peaky Blinders did for Birmingham.
On August 7 – the exact day Nottingham marks 128 years since it gained city status – Alice will launch The Hangman's Turn, part one of The Lions Chamber, the opening novel in a sweeping Georgian crime saga set in the gaols, gin-shops and winding jitties of Nottingham’s past.
The launch date is no accident.
Alice, who was born in Clifton and lived in Nottingham for 37 years before moving to Kirkby, has deliberately timed the release to coincide with the city-status anniversary as what she calls ‘a love letter to a place that doesn’t realise how remarkable it is’.
She said: “Nottingham has always been a city of rebels.
"The cheese riots, the coal riots, the Luddites, the corn-tax riots — they all started here.
"People walk these streets today thinking they’re ordinary, but they’re not so different from their Georgian ancestors.
"That defiance is still in us, even the police would agree with that.”
Set against this turbulent backdrop, The Hangman's Turn follows an unreliable hangman narrator through a Nottingham of secrets, class tension, and dangerous loyalties.
The series also pays a brief, respectful nod to George Africanus — Britain’s first recorded Black entrepreneur, a Nottingham man who, with his wife Esther, built a proud life in the city against considerable odds.
Alice continued: “He’s part of the Nottingham I want people to remember,.
"We forget our own history far too easily.”
That theme of forgotten history runs deep for Johnson, who points out that her childhood home of Clifton once had a thriving mining industry, now almost entirely erased from memory.
She said: “I tell everyone who visits Nottingham the same thing.
Look up, the architecture is extraordinary, we’re surrounded by stories and most of us never notice.”
Beyond the page, Johnson has bigger ambitions. The Lions Chamber is the foundation of a fully written six-season, 72-episode television series she is actively developing for screen – a Georgian-noir world she believes could put Nottingham on the production map.
She said: “Birmingham had Peaky Blinders, Nottingham has every bit as rich and brutal a history – arguably richer.
"I want this to be the story that brings cameras here.”
The novel launches under Johnson’s own imprint, Queensbury Publications, and is available in paperback and e-book, and audiobook.
The Hangman’s Turn, is the first of a trilogy, with the wider series rolling out through 2026.