The wedding of Tom Smith's son and Coddy Hughes' daughter joined together two of England's most ruthless and powerful crime syndicates. Time has not been kind to these two royal families of British organized crime. "The end of an era was drawing in," according to Dave Smith, scion of the dying kingpin Tom Smith. "The legends were dying out."

I. K. Watson's novel, London Town, recounts the mob savagery that erupts when bad blood on the domestic front spills over into the arena of business (and, of course, crime).