A drug panic. Murder. Terrifying and mysterious black and Chinese immigrants. Dope Kings. Jazz. War. An actress dead of an overdose. Dope Girls is about the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which until then had been available in any chemist's shop) into a national menace.

It revolves around the death in 1918, in the last furious stages of the World War, of Bille Carleton, a West End musical actress. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor, and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and in Chinatown there swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated. The drug problem was born, amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.The establishment saw the episode as a threat to white womanhood, menaced by the cocktail of sex and drugs on offer from racial inferiors. Dope Girls remains a highly topical and instructive book.