Lionel Gilyatt is not, and never was, Lionel Gilyatt. He is a figure of an imagination. A figure of Lionel Gilyatt’s imagination. The trite tenet of truth being stranger than fiction goes nowhere near to describing, or transcribing, how truth and fiction are as inseparable as conjoined twins, sharing the same bloodstream of illusory realities, performed deceits and simulated chronologies. In the 1990s the London village of Soho was a macabre kaleidoscope of unlived lives whose only means of expression became, at the hand of our hero, violent death. The pen was never mightier than the sword.