In the summer of 2012 – the ‘Olympic summer’, we journalists are now apparently bound by law to call it, although for me personally it has darker connotations – Night Traffic appeared. Short, extraordinary, explosive. Night Traffic was an account of an incident the previous year in which Pierce had been mugged by a group of youths, no more than teenagers, in a quiet part of his native east London. Finding Pierce’s mobile phone and about £20 in cash to be insufficient reward for their effort, the youths had shown the author a blade, marched him to a cashpoint and forced him to withdraw £300. He spent more than half an hour in their company, crashing through an immense range of emotions from outright terror to perverse bonhomie and back to terror. Afterwards he had been too traumatised to appreciate that he should report what had happened to the police. A dark week was spent shut up in his flat, turning the events of that night over and over in his head, before he realised that he did not want to report it after all. Instead he would compose his own report, tackle the matter as a writer, as a journalist. He returned to the scene during the day and at night, and retraced his steps. He tried to find witnesses. He searched for the youths, sitting out through the small hours. He tried to get CCTV footage of the incident, without success. And he found himself coming to a transgressive acceptance of what had happened: that his ordeal had been a natural part of the ecology of the city and the economy of the night, that it was all preordained and the product of order, not disorder – and, most controversially, that violence might be a salutary urban force, ‘the street seeking balance’.

Night Traffic was not quite an ‘Overnight Success’, as the headline of Pierce’s Guardian interview put it. Panhandler was a small operation, based in Ipswich, and only managed to get it into a few larger bookshops. But Pierce’s cult reputation got it under all the right noses, and even before its official publication there were rumours and previews promising that it was special. Then came a month-long bombardment of long, shining pieces by heavy-hitters: Will Self in the Guardian, Geoff Dyer in the Telegraph, Michael Moorcock in the Independent, Rebecca Solnit in the TLS, Iain Sinclair in the LRB. Panhandler’s first printing sold out immediately and it rushed a deal with Faber for a mass-market paperback, which hit every bookshop in the UK and Ireland just as the award shortlists started to roll in. Knopf bought US rights for six figures. By early 2013, Pierce was a rare creature: a literary celebrity. He even made a brief, ill-at-ease appearance on The One Show, during which, in a first for that programme, he used the word ‘epiphenomenal’.