Two young black dancers, brightly dressed and outrageously queer, sashay down a dull London street. All tight crotch and flamboyant gesture, they are peacocks in a warren of plucked pigeons. For sheer perverse effect on the desexed locals, one dancer halts the sidewalk flow to bend and inspect his shoe—“so that the recalcitrant bowler-hatted or tweed-skirted natives found themselves curiously obstructed by an exotic, questioning behind.”

A boy and girl reunite in a London dance club. They are young and in love; misery and violence are elsewhere. The music plays just for them. And then: “The side window crashed, and a petrol bomb came in and rolled among the dancers and exploded, and the electrics all cut out, and there were shouts and screaming.”

Thus, a worldview: irrestistible arses, and bombs on the dance floor.

Colin MacInnes, the novelist, essayist, critic, experimentalist, and inveterate fringe-dweller whose three essential works—City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr Love and Justice (1960)—form “the London trilogy,” is not exactly unknown, but neither is he quite known. This despite Absolute Beginners having once meant to English teenagers approximately what The Catcher in the Rye meant to American ones; despite that novel having been made into a 1986 musical; and despite its being the inspiration for no less than two great pop songs (by the Jam and David Bowie). The trilogy has recently been reprinted by the English house Allison & Busby, so MacInnes’s fortunes may turn. Then again, they may not. He has been praised but seldom embraced by critics, perused but seldom pursued by readers. But MacInnes deserves a wider renown. He was a man of deep experience and a writer of marvelous resource, a chance-taker and an original, whose work even today appears vibrant and up-to-date.

Born in London in 1914, he was the second son of Angela Thirkell, author of the once enormously popular Barsetshire books (a vast novel sequence about English country life), and served in the British Army and Intelligence Corps, landing at Normandy and interrogating Nazis in the last brutal months preceding V-E Day. In 1955, MacInnes—then carving his niche as a BBC art critic and social commentator—took a lecture tour of Africa; a few months later he was arrested, among black friends in a gambling den, on drug charges. In the late ’60s he was one of several celebrity gullibles supportive of the black militant, ex-gangland enforcer, and future murderer Michael X. Friends say he was bisexual, irascible, and as monkish at home as he was profligate on the town. Stricken with esophageal cancer, MacInnes hemorrhaged fatally in 1976, and was—a voyager for eternity—buried at sea....