The Lowlife  (English, Paperback, Baron Alexander)

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man who loves the dogs. He lives in the quietly respectable streets of Hackney and keeps himself to himself. Until, that is, a new family moves into his building. Step by step, the ordered - if faintly disreputable and financially rackety - life he has led begins to unravel. He is drawn into a murky underworld where violence and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't come up with the money. A brilliant portrayal of a way of life in its last days in the 1960s.