To coincide with the launch of Tony White’s new detective novel Phantom at the Feast (No Exit Press) on 25 June 2026 at Matt’s Gallery, we are pleased to announce an archival presentation of related materials used and generated in the writing of the book.

Phantom at the Feast is the follow-up to White’s acclaimed 2018 novel The Fountain in the Forest. The display includes a series of completed Guardian ‘Quick Crosswords’ (Nos. 4,675–4,725) originally published in 1985, that White first completed daily as a young man in Leeds, then redid en masse thirty years later in order to use the solutions as an Oulipo-inspired lexical constraint – a ‘mandated vocabulary’ – in the writing of the novel. For Matt’s Gallery, all 51 completed crosswords used in the writing of Phantom at the Feast (Guardian days only, so no Sundays or Bank Holidays) are arranged in chronological order in a single vitrine, surrounded by their fascinating ‘bycatch’ of small ads, cartoons and random back-page content captured when printing A4 screengrabs from the British Library’s microfiche readers. As Sukhdev Sandhu writes in his Guardian review of The Fountain in the Forest, the crossword solutions ‘emerge as the collective lexical unconscious of the period.’

A second vitrine in the display contains an array of colour-coded chapter plans, timelines, diagrams, WRDKY breakdowns (‘What Rex Doesn’t Know Yet’), Post-it notes, and ephemera that went into the five-year writing of Phantom at the Feast; offering a rare insight into the process of writing what is of course a further puzzle: a police-procedural murder-mystery and whodunnit. Phantom at the Feast marks the return of White’s complex and compelling London cop Detective Sergeant Rex King of Holborn Police Station, with White once again combining police procedural and detective mystery genres with UK social history and literary games.

Phantom at the Feast, launching at Matt’s Gallery, London, 25 July 2026

Tony White, ‘Crosswords and Constraints: notebooks, plans and ephemera from the writing of the novel Phantom at the Feast’

25 June – 28 June 2025 Thursday–Sunday 12-6pm

Then 1–10 July, Wednesday–Friday 12-6pm

Archive on the Mezzanine at Matt’s Gallery

Matt’s Gallery

6 Charles Clowes Walk

London SW11 7AN

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