Pierce’s second novel, Murder Boards, had the good fortune to appear just before the 2011 riots. To capitalise, the post-riot paperback was given a sensational cover, with a movie-like strapline: THE CITY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE. This bore little relation to its contents, 500 pages of non-linear narrative and cut-up technique told from the multiple viewpoints of its spectral cast of characters. It was concerned – obsessed, really – with missing persons and unresolved crimes, and steeped in police jargon and the imagery and phrasing of TV news. At times, it appeared to be deliberately opaque and confusing, as if the reader were an investigator confronted with contradictory accounts of events and inscrutable enmity between characters, between reader and author, between author and reality, with the objective truth of the past unknowable. To give up on Murder Boards was to play Pierce’s game, to take on the role of the indifferent bystander, the grazing TV viewer, the desensitised inquisitor, the impatient and unsympathetic bureaucracy. The reader’s natural frustration with a long and frankly exhausting experimental novel was thus subverted. Read to the end or put the book down unfinished – either way, Pierce won. Reviewers were divided. One-third of them hailed Pierce as a genius, another third called him a charlatan. The remainder made it obvious they did not understand the book, and maybe had not even finished it, by playing it safe with cautious praise.

After the modest success of Mile End Road, Faber had poached Pierce from Panhandler and put out Murder Boards with much ballyhoo, but despite a brief life as an edgy fashion accessory and social media prop, it was a resounding commercial failure. Whatever happened, Pierce was back at Panhandler for his third book, Night Traffic. Maybe the big house took fright at the thought of releasing a long essay covering many of the same themes as the chunky, expensive literary novel that was stinking up its balance sheets.

But since the appearance of Murder Boards, Pierce had acquired a small and eager following, myself included. His post-riots essay for 3AM Magazine, ‘Beneath the Paving Stones, the Fire’, had circulated on Twitter and Tumblr for more than a month, and was republished by the New York Times. Pierce had been writing essays about London for years, but now his writing became more adventurous, more scandalous, and funnier. He was able to arrange gonzo escapades that other journalists – again, myself included – could only dream about. A night spent with criminal fly-tippers, dumping trash on street corners and narrowly evading the police. Searching for forgotten IRA arms caches in north London back gardens. A memorably hilarious excursion with three Russian heiresses, the daughters of Knightsbridge-resident oligarchs, to find and consume authentic East End jellied eels.