Peter Hamilton

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 . . .