Danelaw - Peter Hamilton

DANELAW is based upon articles in the anti-Fascist magazine SEARCHLIGHT in the early 1990’s, which reported an attempt by the neo-Nazi group COMBAT 18 to establish a white-supremacist homeland in East Anglia, with Chelmsford as the capital. COMBAT 18 was then under the leadership of ‘Charlie’ Sergeant. However, the attempt failed when the party’s accountant tried to abscond with party funds and was caught and stabbed to death by Sergeant in a caravan park in Harlow. At the same time as these articles there also appeared in the magazine reports of so-called ‘honey-trap’ operations by the Secret Service whereby advertisements for new far-right parties were placed in various neo-Nazi magazines and then anyone who applied was placed on record. I combined these two reports into a plot in which the Secret Service decide to set up DANELAW, a whites-only homeland based on the ancient Viking Danelaw of the 9th and 10th centuries, train any applicants into a private army with the apparent intention of attacking mosques, and then at the last minute swoop and arrest them all.

Cliff, a sometime football hooligan, is serving a five year prison sentence for assaulting an Asian man when he is visited by the mysterious Mr. Warboys, a “business entrepreneur” who offers him the chance to re-establish the DANELAW – the Golden Age of Viking rule . . . and so begins a darkly-comic tragedy of violence and death . . .