Underworld: Showdown at the Red Lion

The Red Lion Beer Hall stood on the corner of Commissioner and what was then Bezuidenhout Street, in a racially-mixed area of long-since vanished Johannesburg known colloquially as Frenchfontein.

It was here, in December 1894, that a one-armed Irish outlaw, Jack McLoughlin, gunned down George Stevenson, a former member of his safe-cracking gang. It was, as the historian Charles van Onselen reveals in a new book, not only an act of revenge but the settling of a debt of honour.

McLoughlin, then in his mid-30s, was a man who had difficulty coming to terms with his sexuality. He was not only infatuated with Stevenson, a raffish English boxer who at the time was happily ensconced with a coloured prostitute named Sarah Fredericks, but had been betrayed by him as well. Following a botched burglary in Pretoria earlier that year, Stevenson had shopped McLoughlin to detectives in a deal to remain out of prison - he was an informer and had to die.

Around this seemingly straightforward murder Van Onselen has built the engaging Showdown at the Red Lion: The Life and Times of Jack McLoughlin, 1859-1910 , an exhaustive investigation that ranges the length and breadth of Britain's imperialist adventures, from the "dark Satanic Mills" of 1850s industrial Manchester to the Australian outback via the goldfields of the Witwatersrand before McLoughlin 's grim conclusion at the end of a noose in the newly built Pretoria Central Prison.

No detail in McLoughlin's life has been spared, and he emerges from these pages a complex, troubled figure, not only of the Irish diaspora but of the world Van Onselen first introduced in 2010's Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880-1899.

That book, Van Onselen says, is a sort of "idiot's guide" or overview into Irish marginality. "The question that then comes for the intelligent reader is 'Yes, I can see it in structure and process and how it all came about but who, exactly, are these people'?"

Showdown, then, answers that question. As in the case with much of Van Onselen's work, there are uncanny, if not disquieting parallels between the past and the present. Johannesburg remains a frontier town. McLoughlin's act of murder was as characteristic of South Africa in the late 19th century as it is now in the early 21st.

McLoughlin had warned Stevenson that he was coming. "Throughout the day," Von Onselen says, "he'd sent him messages. 'By tonight you'll be dead.' So this is not a conventional murder at all. It's staged. It's sequenced. It's codified. It's within disciplines, within rules. He's asking the man to prepare himself."

This "code of masculinity", as Van Onselen puts it, is a theme of Showdown.

"The more 'civilised' and settled a society becomes, the more patterns of meting out justice become codified and normative."

But it was "civilisation" that was McLoughlin 's undoing. H is world was fast disappearing. It was, Van Onselen explains, the dawn of the surveillance era. "This was a moment before passports, but fingerprinting was just coming on stream."

Outlaws like McLoughlin moved freely between the far-flung colonies surrounding the Indian Ocean rim - Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and others - on steamships. But they could not outrun the telegraph.

And yet, just as then, our borders remain porous. And our underworld just as cosmopolitan and colourful. Think only of Radovan Krejcir, George Louca and Vito Palazzolo, among others.

• Published by Jonathan Ball, R295