Murder and mayhem - it must be sarf London

"This wasn't the ghetto; the ghetto was Belgravia, Knightsbridge and parts of Notting Hill. This was London as a world city," writes Kureishi, celebrating what he calls the poorest and most mixed part of the city. The last author to set a novel in the borough was Tim Lott in his impressive debut, White City Blue (published in 1999). However, his foray beyond the Green didn't really catch on and few authors until now have dared to follow his lead.

It is a fate suffered by too many London neighbourhoods. Trendy north London has traditionally exerted more of a pull on the literary psyche than the purlieus of, say, Chiswick. Martin Amis made Notting Hill perennially fashionable and its streets are still stalked by Nicola Six and Keith Talent, if only in the collective imagination. Zadie Smith's White Teeth spearheaded the move for locating a sexy ethnic novel in an unsexy part of town - Willesden. Soon after, Monica Ali followed suit with Brick Lane.

Sarf London, by contrast, has never had such a good write-up. Kureishi is more charitable about Shepherd's Bush than he ever was about poor old Bromley, the setting of his autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The south-east suburb was portrayed as tedious, austere and full of "turdy parks". Graham Greene's The End of the Affair takes place on Clapham Common, but he didn't do the area any favours: it seems to be perpetually drizzling throughout the book. Never has the city seemed so dank and depressing.

And if south London is not deathly dull, it is often portrayed as horribly dangerous. Nigel Williams's black comedy The Wimbledon Poisoner is about a solicitor desperate to murder his wife. SW19 is rendered a seething cauldron of repressed passion and homicidal thoughts. It is a theme echoed in JG Ballard's dystopian novels: in his Kingdom Come, the Surrey suburban hinterland fringing the western rim of the M25 is a hotbed of neo-Nazism.

Few writers have been able to escape the shadow of Dickens when it comes to portraying London. His novels seemed to encapsulate the entire city and London became the central character of his work. Where is today's great London novelist? There isn't one. All London novels have become too piecemeal and too fragmentary. Dame Iris Murdoch wrote that parts of London are necessary, and parts are contingent. But shouldn't Purley be as necessary as Notting Hill? At least Kureishi put Shepherd's Bush on the necessary map.