Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 25/28

18:03

Istvan Fallok's little alley in Soho

(The Medusa Frequency, Her Name Was Lola)

In the paragraph immediately before this one (from Medusa), Herman Orff describes his walk from Oxford Circus Tube to Istvan Fallok’s studio-cum-neurology lab where he takes his HEAD FOR IT treatment. From a map of Soho it was easy enough to locate the real streets but the location of Fallok’s office itself was not stated. It wasn’t strictly necessary to find it, as there were any number of streets around and about this labyrinthine, dusky quarter which would easily suit Fallok’s purpose, but following the directions led me to a cul-de-sac off Broadwick Street called Dufours Place which could easily have accommodated such shenanigans. This was a cobbled square surrounded by smart office buildings and although there was no scaffolding today, there were steps leading down into a basement office and a window with a lamp in it twinkling in the night, where it was easy to imagine Herman getting hooked up to Fallok’s ECG-Fairlight combination and, more recently, Max Klein from Her Name Was Lola playing Fallok the mysterious CD that arrived through his door in similar fashion to the Medusa HEAD FOR IT flyer. Accordingly I put the quote through the letterbox on the ground floor level door and went back out into Broadwick Street and Oxford Street for the final section of my journey.

Postscript: Istvan Fallok resurfaced in Linger Awhile (2006). Herman Orff also had a walk-on part.

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