He is, however, involved in Satanic practices (something inculcated in him as an orphan), a fact which he must keep secret from all his associates, including his supervisor Sir Christopher Wren.

In the 20th century, DCS Nicholas Hawksmoor is called in to investigate a bizarre series of murders by strangulation that have occurred in and around the churches designed by Dyer.

However the area is stalked by mysterious shadows, and it becomes clear that not only the weight of the investigation, but unseen forces from the past come to bear on Hawksmoor in a powerful, destructive manner.

Hawksmoor was indeed assistant of Sir Christopher Wren, who is shown in the novel, historically correct, as profoundly interested in science and an active member of the Royal Society.

One critic has argued that Dyer's churches come to stand for the persistence of popular history and culture, in opposition to Wren's devotion to a rational progress driven by power and money.

[6] Nicholas Dyer believes in a syncretistic religion based on an utterly pessimistic view of man and world, represented by London: "In keeping with his Biblical belief that 'it was Cain who built the first City', Dyer leads us through the 'monstrous Pile of London' – 'Nest of Death and Contagion', 'Capital City of the World of Affliction', 'Hive of Noise and Ignorance'.

Among the sources he merges for his religion are the Ammonites, the Carthaginians, "the Straw Man of our Druides," the Syrian Beel-Zebub, the Assyrians, the Jews, the Cabbala, Joseph of Arimathea, the Cathedral of Bath, the Temple of Moloch, Westminster and Anubis.

A four-liner expresses the syncretist nature of Mirabilis's sect: Pluto, Jehova, Satan, Dagon, Love, Moloch, the Virgin, Thetis, Devil, Jove, Pan, Jahweh, Vulcan, he with th'awfull Rod, Jesus, the wondrous Straw Man, all one God.

In his last, 20th-century reincarnation, Dyer's evil emanation is embodied by the tramp called "The Architect", his good or rational side, by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The text expresses their final unification in the last paragraph of the novel when only one person speaks: What is said is separated by a wide blank on the page, indicating change of narrative level.

"Ackroyd's aim is [...] to expose the linear character of time [...] for the fabrication that it is, and to propel his readers into a zone of full temporal simultaneity.

Sinclair's thesis is that Hawksmoor planned his churches according to a strict "geometry of oppositions" producing a "system of energies, or unit of connection, within the city," similar to those formed by "the old hospitals, the Inns of Courts, the markets, the prisons, the religious houses and the others".

"[15] Coined by the French Situationist Guy Debord, psychogeography originally referred to practices intended to expose the "urban geography falsified by the commercial and consumerist imperatives of late capitalism".

[17] Debord undertook what he called dérives (literally 'drifts' across the city) that showed the various layers of place (historical, psychic, physical).

"[11] "The basic principle at work here derives directly from Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem that juxtaposes the past with the present to show the continuity of history.

This structure of repetitions and references underlines the peculiar theory of time the novel transports: "As we go on reading, we find more and more [...] reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart, until we are forced to conclude that, in the novel, nothing progresses in time, that the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and that the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death.

Ackroyd here imitates unofficial 18th-century English (characterized by capitalization, Frenchified suffixes, irregular orthography) as can be found in Samuel Pepys's diary.

[24] The name Dyer gives his occultism is "Scientia Umbrarum" (shadowy knowledge)[25] The murder victims all fall prey to an ominous figure called "the shadow".

"[27] For Dyer the monument of Stonehenge is an ancient place of occult powers, of a deep connection with a dark past because of its stones: "The true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones.

I don’t want to speak personally, but when I wrote a book called Hawksmoor, in 1986, it was considered rather a joke to write a novel set both in the past and in the present.

"Suffice it to say that in a detective story whose strange outcome is reincarnation, fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is, one might say, inflicted on the reader.

Joyce Carol Oates for The New York Times wrote: Hawksmoor is a witty and macabre work of the imagination, intricately plotted, obsessive in its much-reiterated concerns with mankind's fallen nature.

Dyer's "romantic" churches at Spitalfields, Wapping, Limehouse, Greenwich, Lombard Street, Bloomsbury and Moorfields are poetically vivid, as is his encounter, as a boy, with a group of druid devil worshipers who convert him to their beliefs.

[...] But in all, Hawksmoor is an unfailingly intelligent work of the imagination, a worthy counterpart in fiction to Mr. Ackroyd's much-acclaimed biography of Eliot.

[11]Peter S. Prescott, in Newsweek, defined it "a fascinating hybrid, a tale of terrors that does double duty as a novel of ideas".

"[23] Dave Langford reviewed Hawksmoor for White Dwarf #99, and stated that "unforgettably black vision of crossed timelines and sinister compulsions built into London's religious architecture".

This history-spanning dual narrative prefigures the writer's pet themes, 'history-mystery' and the expression of a dialectic relationship between past and present.

[...] Although told in alternating sequences, the two story lines collapse into each other and intertwine ambivalently, the novel offering a sample of the complex architectonic structure of Ackroyd's fictions.

Peter Ackroyd himself is a harsh critic of his novel: I certainly haven’t looked at [Hawksmoor] again, I wouldn’t dare; I’m so aware of all the weaknesses in it, it’s an embarrassment.

[43] It was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Nick Fisher in 2000, with Philip Jackson playing the eponymous role, Norman Rodway as Sir Christopher Wren, Richard Johnson as Mirabilis and was produced by Janet Whitaker.