Leeds

THE FACES OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Can crime novels teach you anything about a location? Fans of the late Phil Rickman would argue that they knew the Hereford/Wales borderlands through his Merrily Watkins novels. Readers of Jim Kelly’s Phillip Dryden books might , as a consequence, claim a nodding acquaintance with the Fens. London? Perhaps too vast and unknowable despite the best efforts of Mark Billingham and Tony Parsons. Leeds? I knew it through countless visits to an undergraduate son, but always found the place rather intimidating. Chris Nickson lives there, and has used it as the background for three series of novels. In those featuring Simon Westow we are in Georgian times. The baton is then handed on to Tom Harper, who bestrides the city like a colossus from Victoria’s reign to the period after The Great War.

Now we are in WW2, with a redoubtable young woman, Cathy Marsden, who has been seconded from the local police force to the Special Investigation Branch, an embryonic group whose work sits in the gap between regular policing and military intelligence. We are in the spring of 1944. Cathy is newly engaged to Tom, a mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He has served in North Africa, where he has managed to keep himself out of the firing line. Now, after a spell of leave, he has been recalled.

There are rumours that the Allies are building up to ‘something big’. At work, Cathy and her colleagues are investigating a fatal car crash in which a local spiv and his girlfriend were killed. More intriguing is the fact that the boot of the car was filled with handguns stolen from American and British barrack armouries.When another small time local crook, Ricky Hopper, ends up being mangled in the metal waterwheel of a local factory, Cathy realises that these are deep waters, as dark and dangerous as the River Aire itself.

Nickson effortlessly captures the privations of ordinary Britains during the war.
“Cathy settled with her fish paste sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and thermos flask of tomato soup. Her mother made the same thing each week. One more routine of war, she’d be happy to leave behind.”

The author makes other very apposite cultural references. Safe in her own bed, in her own home, Cathy reads herself to sleep with Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill, a romantic saga about an Irish family, published just a year earlier.

Vernon Scannell wrote:
“Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:”
That terrible conflict hangs heavy over the Marsden household. Gassed while ‘doing his bit’, Cathy’s father’s lungs were ruined, and every breath is a struggle. There is a terrible irony that just three decades later, the same mortal enemies are intent on ripping out each others’ hearts.The SIB search narrows in focus. They are looking for two men. Dandy Wilson is the new Mr Big in the Leeds underworld of touts and black marketeers, while Corporal Lyle Brevitt is the source of the pilfered American stores. Anxious to find the latter is US military policeman Frank Graves.The SIB receive reliable information about where to find Wilson, but when they raid the property, their quarry is gone. Given the timescale, the inescapable conclusion is that someone is passing on inside information to the fugitive. Does the leak come from the regular police or – unthinkably – from someone in SIB?

Eventually, both Wilson and Brevitt are tracked down and the traitor within is unmasked. What Nickson – like all good novelists – does well is to make us care deeply about the central characters. Here, we leave Leeds on the eve of ‘D’ Day, and we can only hope that Cathy’s Tom survives what is to come, and returns to claim his bride. The Faces of The Dead was published by Severn House on 7th April.

April 6, 2026 0

A RAGE OF SOULS . . . Between the covers

This begins as one of the most baffling and impenetrable of Simon Westow’s cases. We are in Leeds, 1826. He solves a case of fraud, the fraudster is sentence to hang, but reprieved. He then returns with his wife to shadow the man he originally tried to defraud. The man, who calls himself Fox, seems connected to his victim, a Mr Barton, via Barton’s wayward son, Andrew. Westow, like Ulysses in Tennyson’s great poem, no longer has “that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven,” due to a serious wound sustained in a previous case, but his eyes, ears – and legs on the street are provided by his lethal young assistants Jane and Sally.

One of Nickson’s many skills as a writer is to point out the dramatic contrast between the industrial stink of Leeds and the uncorrupted countryside not many miles outside the city. Andrew Barton goes missing, so Jane and the boy’s anxious father make the journey in a chaise towards Tadcaster. Jane investigates the ancient church of St Mary, Lead, solitary and empty in a lonely field. Near the church runs the Cock Beck, which was reported to have run red with blood during the nearby Battle of Towton in 1461, and as she crosses the stream , she makes a terrible discovery.

Quietly, Nickson references the timeless joy of reading. Jane, once an illiterate street urchin, has been taught to read by Mrs Shields, the old lady who has become the mother she never had. Now, Jane spends her spare hours immersed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, borrowed from the circulating library. The printed words take Jane away from the perils and drudgery of her own existence to a world of daring, adventure and hope. In his own way. Nickson does precisely the same thing.

There is a deep sense of poetry in the book, not just in the words, but in the juxtaposition of images. The book begins with Jane witnessing the result of a horrifying industrial accident. A young girl is being roughly carried to the surgeon, her leg mangled beyond repair. This haunts Jane throughout the book, but then, near the end, there is a kind of redemption. One of the regular characters who ekes out a living on Westow’s streets is Davy, the blind fiddler. Jane’s trauma is redeemed:

“Up by the market cross, Davy Cassidy was playing a sprightly tune that ended as she drew close. He gazed around with his sightless eyes and a girl appeared whispering a word into his ear. He lifted his bow and began to play again, low, mournful. Then the girl stepped forward and began to sing. Jane knew her face. She’d lived with it for months. She’d seen it contorted with pain as the girl was carried from the mill, her leg in shreds. Then when it returned night after night in her dreams. Now she was here, one-legged, supported by a crutch, a voice as unearthly sweet as a visitation as she sang about a girl who moved through the fair. She stood transfixed as a disbelief fragmented and disappeared. The pain she’d heard in the girl that day in February had become beauty. The small crowd was silent, caught in the words, the singing while the world receded around them. The last note ended, a stunned silence, then applause and people pushing forward to put coins into the hat on the ground.”

Eventually, by a mixture of judgment perseverance and good fortune, the mysterious Fox is run to ground in a bloodthirsty finale. A Rage of Souls is Chris Nickson at his best – complex, compelling and, above all. compassionate. It will be published by Severn House on 7th October. You can take a look at earlier Simon Westow books here.

October 3, 2025 0

THE DEVIL’S SMILE . . . Between the covers

This is the sequel to The Lollipop Man (read my review from earlier this year) and we are reunited with reluctant student investigator Adrian Brown, and his friend Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and co-presenter of Yorkshire Crimetime, a regional TV show featuring local criminal activity.. Adrian’s social life is not exactly glittering, and consists largely of optimistic – but largely disappointing – trips to gay pubs and clubs in mid 1990s Leeds. A recent Yorkshire Crimetime featured the murder of a young gay man, a waiter at a local Italian bistro.

Thanks to a timely intervention by his housemate, Adrian has survived the consequences of one drunken pick-up too many, in the shape of an encounter with a predator called Edmund. Meanwhile, Sheila’s co-presenter Tony Tranter has gone missing. He is a narcissistic drunk, and has a reputation for unreliability, but this time his absence seems more serious. Then, Tranter’s car is found abandoned under Leeds railway station, bearing signs of a violent struggle. Not long after, his body is found nearby, concealed beside one of the vast Dark Arches above which is the station, and below which the captive River Aire roars and foams. Sheila, fed information by her journalist friend Jeanette Dinsdale, know knows that a scandal was about to break. Tranter was a member of an exclusive and secretive club, where underage girls and boys were provided to provide ‘entertainment’.

The initial, and benevolent, reaction of the TV people is that Tony Tranter was killed in revenge for some criminal who had been brought down as a result of Yorkshire Crimetime’s actions. Sheila suspects differently, but goes along with the initial impetus to record a TV special which will enlist the help of tens of thousands of viewers to bring Tranter’s killer to justice. Adrian, meanwhile, has finally reported his assault to the largely uninterested West Yorkshire Police, concerned

I have tagged this novel as #historicalcrimefiction, but it just doesn’t seem that long ago. I was never an addicted viewer, but Crimewatch was, for a few years a major BBC show. Main presenter, the earnest and clean-cut Nick Ross, with his ‘glamorous assistant’ Sue Cook, purported to solve crimes by presenting re-enactions of crime scenes, and inviting viewers to telephone in with information. It seems bizarre that it lasted as long as it did, and is haunted by the supreme irony that the murder of one of its later presenters, Suzanne Dando, remains one of the great unsolved crimes in British history. Sheila Hargreaves’s show is something similar, and has a huge audience.

It is worth taking a moment to look at Leeds as a crime novel setting. In terms of output, the stories of Chris Nickson take some beating, and he has set his novels in different historical periods, my favourites being the Tom Harper books which follow the Leeds copper from the late Victorian era through to the end of The Great War. In terms of grim and grimy readabiity, the GrandDaddy has to be David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, set from 1974 to 1983, which pretty much encompassed the era of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. My review of two of those books is here.

Back to this novel. Daniel Sellers has Sheila, Adrian, the police (and us) following a series of imaginatively crafted red herrings, until a thrilling finale reveals the truth. This enterprising and addictive thriller will be published by Allison & Busby on 21st August.

August 17, 2025 0

NO PRECIOUS TRUTH . . . Between the covers

In my reading experience, there is no living writer so closely associated with one place than Chris Nickson. Phil Rickson had his Welsh Marches, Robert B Parker had his Boston, Colin Dexter had his Oxford and Christopher Fowler had his (peculiar) London. Sadly, Time has borne those four sons away, but Nickson’s Leeds is now rediscovered in the first of a new series.

It is February 1941. Cathy Marsden is a Sergeant in the Leeds police, but has been seconded to the Special Investigations Bureau, a unit recently set up to investigate black marketeers and other criminals looking to make money out of the war. She is astonished when her older brother, Daniel, turns up at the office. As far as she was aware he was humdrum civil servant in London, pushing pens and folders of documents from one desk to another. Like her, however, he has been seconded, but to another top secret intelligence service, and he is in Leeds to track down a dangerous Dutch double agent called Jan Minuit.

Although I have read and enjoyed them all, Nickson’s Leeds novels tend to have a similar plot, which is basically a manhunt. This enables the author’s creations from Simon Westow to Tom Harper (who gets a brief mention here) to pound the streets of the city in search of a villain. The technical aspect of this is not complicated, as it enables Nickson to put his unparalleled knowledge of the topography to good use. He is clearly in tune with a kind of of geopsychology, which enables readers to follow the footsteps of his characters across the decades, so that thoroughfares like Briggate, The Headrow and Kirkgate become as familiar as our own back yards.

If Minuit is bent on sabotage, Leeds has two prime targets for an agent of The Third Reich. One is pretty much in the open. The Kirkstall iron foundry has been producing components for military vehicles since WW1 and is hard to disguise. The Avro factory at Yeadon, however has been covered in camouflage and disguised – from the air – as open country. This ‘shadow factory’ is working day and night to produce Lancaster bombers, as well as the less celebrated (but equally vital) Anson.

Nickson has a well-established style. It is propulsive. Short sentences. A sense of urgency. Genuine narrative drive.

“Cathy turned off the ring road and started up Wheatwood Lane.The daylight was lasting longer, barely a stretch of dusk on the horizon. Ahead of her, the hill rose steeply, fields on either side, farmland.No chance to go more than a few yards.The road was filled with police cars, a pair of ambulances and the black coroner’s van.,”

“Monday dawned sour with threatening clouds, the colour of old bruises. The air was thick and damp. Yesterday’s promise of spring had vanished like a magician’s illusion. Instead, the rain felt that it like might begin at any time. At least it would deter the Luftwaffe.”

There is a thrilling conclusion to the team’s pursuit of Jan Minuit, and it is Cathy’s resilience and strength which eventually brings the spy/saboteur to his knees. Chris Nickson’s skill lies in his ability to convince us that we are standing beside his characters and sharing their world. In this case, it is Cathy Marsden’s wartime Leeds, with its rationing and privation, its fear that clear nighttime skies will be a gift to the Luftwaffe, and the ever present fear in the hearts of local women that their father, husband, brother, son or boyfriend will be the next name on the mounting list of casualties.

Nickson also reminds us that the horrors of WW1 cast a long shadow. Cathy’s father, once a strapping Yorkshire lad, was gassed in the trenches, and over thirty years later is a wreckage of a man, struggling with the essentials of existence – such as breathing. No Precious Truth will be published by Severn House on 1st April.

March 30, 2025 0

THEM WITHOUT PAIN . . . Between the covers

Leeds. The early early summer of 1825. Simon Westow is a Thief-taker, a man who recovers stolen goods for a percentage of their value. He has no legal powers except his own knowledge of the city and a keen intelligence. When he encounters criminals, it is up to the city Constable and the magistrates to apply the law. Followers of this series will be familiar with the dramatis personnae, but for new readers, we have:

Simon Westow, Thief-taker
Rosie, his wife
Richard and Amos, their twin sons
Jane Truscott, former assistant to Westow. Very streetwise and deadly with a knife
Catherine Shields, an elderly widow who has provided Jane with a home
Sally – another child of the streets, and Jane’s replacement

Westow is summoned to the house of Sir Robert Foley, a wealthy man whose man-servant has absconded with two valuable silver cups. Foley wants them returned. When the manservant, Thomas Kendall, is found murdered in a secret room of an old city property just about to be demolished, Westow is told, by a Mr Armistead, that the room was once the workshop of Arthur Mangey, a silversmith, who was executed over a century earlier for the crime of Coin Clipping – snipping the edges off silver coins and then re-using the silver.

When Armistead himself is found murdered, Westow finds himself chasing shadows, and unable to make the connection between the ancient misdeeds of Arthur Mangey and persons unknown who are deeply involved in all-too-recent criminality. There is a seemingly unconnected story line in the book, but old Nickson hands know that it will, eventually, merge with the main plot. A disabled Waterloo veteran, Dobson, has gained a mysterious companion known only as John, but when brutalised corpses begin to appear, John becomes the prime suspect. The corpses have been flayed and brutalised almost beyond recognition. Westow, still doggedly determined to find the missing silver cups is increasingly reliant on the quicksilver street-smarts of Sally, and the old head on young shoulders of Jane, who had hoped for a life away from the streets, but has been drawn back into the dangerous game by her determination to avenge the death of Armistead.

A recurrent theme of Nickson’s Leeds novels, both in these Simon Westow tales, and the Tom Harper stories, set eight decades later, is that of the search. Both Westow and Harper frequently become involved in a search for a key suspect, often someone from ‘out of town’. It is a very simple literary device, but a very effective one, as it provides a platform for Nickson to use his unrivalled knowledge of the city as it once was, its highways, byways, grand houses and insanitary tenements. As we follow Weston’s search for a ruthless killer, the modern streets of Leeds that many readers know are stripped away to reveal the palimpsest of the buildings that once stood there and the people who inhabited them.

Another essential feature of the books is that his heroes don’t inhabit a timeless world, where they are perpetually in their early thirties, strong and vigorous. Tom Harper aged as the series went on, but he was allowed a comfortable old age and peaceful death. Here, Simon Westow is shaken by the recognition that, like Tennyson Ulysses, the years have taken their toll:

“ Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

He is aware that his reflexes are slower, the antennae that once sensed danger and threat are less sensitive, and he is ever more conscious of his own mortality, and his need of people like Sally and Jane to watch his back.

The novel boils down to three pursuits. Simon Westow hunts the man who stole Sir Robert’s cups, Sally wants her knife deep inside the man, known only as John, who murdered her fellow urchin Harold, while Jane vows to kill the man who killed the amiable and blameless Armistead.

Chris Nickson never sugar-coats history, and makes us well aware that modern Leeds, with its universities, its international sporting venues and museums, was built on the blood sweat and tears of millions of ordinary people who grew up, toiled, loved lived and died under the smoky pall of its foundry furnaces, and had the deafening percussion of industrial hammers forever ringing in their ears. Jane, Sally and Simon-at a cost-each get their man in this excellent historical thriller, which is published by Severn House and is available now. For reviews of previous Simon Westow stories, click the author image on the left.

September 16, 2024 0

THE SCREAM OF SINS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, Autumn 1824. Simon Westow is engaged by a retired military man, Captain Holcomb, to recover some papers which have been stolen from his house. They concern the career of his father, a notoriously hard-line magistrate. Newcomers to the series may find this graphic helpful to establish who is who.

Westow takes the job, but is concerned when Holcomb refuses to reveal what might be in the missing papers, thus preventing the thief taker from narrowing down a list of suspects. As is often the case in this excellent series, what begins as case of simple theft turns much darker when murder raises its viler and misshapen head.

Jane, Westow’s sometime assistant, has taken a step back from the work as, under the kind attention of Catherine Shields, she is learning that there is a world outside the dark streets she used to inhabit. The lure of books and education is markedly different from the law of the knife, and a life spent lurking in shadowy alleys. Nevertheless, she agrees to come back to help Westow with his latest case, which has turned sour. When Westow, suspecting there is more to the case than meets the eye, refuses to continue looking for the missing documents, Holcomb threatens to sue him and ruin his reputation.

More or less by accident, Westow and Jane have uncovered a dreadful series of crimes which may connected to the Holcomb documents. Young girls – and it seems the younger the better – have been abducted for the pleasure of certain wealth and powerful ‘gentlemen’. Jane, galvanised by her own bitter memories of being sexually abused by her father, meets another youngster from the streets, Sally.

Sally is a mirror image of Jane in her younger days – street-smart, unafraid of violence, and an expert at wielding a viciously honed knife. Jane hesitates in recruiting the child to a way of life she wishes to move away from, but the men involved in the child abuse must be brought down, and Sally’s apparent innocence is a powerful weapon.

As ever in Nickson’s Leeds novels, whether they be these, the Victorian era Tom Harper stories, or those set in the 1940s and 50s, the city itself is a potent force in the narrative. The contrast between the grinding poverty of the underclass – barely surviving in their insanitary slums – and the growing wealth of the merchants and factory owners could not be starker. The paradox is not just a human one. The River Aire is the artery which keeps the city’s heart beating, but as it flows past the mills and factories, it is coloured by the poison they produce. Yet, at Kirkstall, where it passes the stately ruins of the Abbey it is still – at least in the 1820s – a pure stream home to trout and grayling. Just an hour’s walk from Westow’s beat, there are moors, larks high above, and air unsullied by sulphur and the smoke of foundry furnaces.

The scourge of paedophilia is not something regularly used as subject matter in crime fiction, perhaps because it is – and this is my personal view – if not the worst of all crimes, then at least as bad as murder. Yes, the victims that survive may still live and breathe, but their innocence has been ripped away and, in its place, has been implanted a mental and spiritual tumour for which there is no treatment. Two little girls are rescued by Westow, Jane and Sally and are restored to their parents, but what living nightmares await them in the years to come we will never know.

I have come to admire Nickson’s passion for his city and its history, and his skill at making characters live and breathe is second to none, but in this powerful and haunting novel he reminds us that we are only ever a couple of steps from the abyss. The Scream of Sins will be published by Severn House on 5th March.

March 1, 2024 0

RUSTED SOULS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, March 1920. Tom Harper is Chief Constable of the City force and, with just six weeks until his retirement, he is dearly hoping for a quiet ride home for the final furlong of what has been a long and distinguished career. His hopes are dashed, however, when he is summoned to the office of Alderman Ernest Thompson, the combative, blustering – but very powerful – leader of the City Council. Thompson has one last task for Harper, and it is a very delicate one. The politician has fallen a trap that is all too familiar to many elderly men of influence down the years. He has, shall we say, been indiscreet with a beautiful but much younger woman, Charlotte Radcliffe. Letters that he foolishly wrote to her have “gone missing” and now he has an anonymous note demanding money – or else his reputation will be ruined. He wants Harper to solve the case, but keep everything completely off the record. Grim-faced, Harper has little choice but to agree. It is due to Thompson’s support and encouragement that he is ending his career as Chief Constable, with a comfortable pension and an untarnished reputation. He chooses a small group of trusted colleagues, swears them to secrecy, and sets about the investigation.

He soon has other things to worry about. A quartet of young armed men robs a city centre jewellers, terrifying the staff by firing a shot into the ceiling. They strike again, but this time with fatal consequences. A bystander tries to intervene, and is shot dead for his pains. Many readers will have been following this excellent series for some time, and will know that tragedy has struck the Harper family. Tom’s wife Annabelle has what we know now as dementia, and requires constant care. Their daughter Mary is a widow. Her husband Len is one of the 72000 men who fought and died on the Somme, but have no known grave, and no memorial excep tfor a name on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing.. Unlike many widows, however, she has been able to rebuild her life, and now runs a successful secretarial agency. Leeds, however, like so many communities, is no place fit for heroes:

“‘Times are hard.’
“I know,” Harper agreed.
It was there in the bleak faces of the men, the worn-down looks of their wives, the hunger that kept the children thin. The wounded ex-servicemen reduced to begging on the streets. Things hadn’t changed much from when he was young. Britain had won the war but forgotten its own people.”

Nickson’s descriptions of his beloved Leeds are always powerful, but here he describes a city – like many others – reeling from a double blow. As if the carnage of the Great War were not enough, the Gods had another spiteful trick up their sleeves in the shape of Spanish Influenza, which killed 228000 people across the country. Many people are still wearing gauze masks in an attempt to ward off infection.

The hunt for the jewel robbers and Ernest Jackson’s letters continues almost to the end of the book and, as ever, Nickson tells a damn good crime story; for me however, the focus had long since shifted elsewhere. This book is all about Tom and Annabelle Harper. Weather-wise, spring is definitely in the air, as bushes and trees come back to life after the bareness of winter, but there is a distinctly autumnal air about what is happening on the page. Harper is, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, not the man he was.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

As he tries to help at the scene of a crime, he reflects:

“There was nothing he could do to help here; he was just another old man cluttering up the pavement and stopping the inspector from doing his job.”

As for Annabelle, the lovely, brave and vibrant woman of the earlier books, little is left:

“The memories would remain. She’d have them too, but they were tucked away in pockets that were gradually being sewn up. All her past was being stolen from her. And he couldn’t stop the theft.”

This is a magnificent and poignant end to the finest series of historical crime fiction I have ever read. It is published by Severn House and will be available on 5th September. For more about the Tom Harper novels, click this link.

September 4, 2023 0

PAST TIMES – OLD CRIMES . . . 1974 and 1977 by David Peace

This occasional series of retrospective reviews seeks to ask and – hopefully – answer a few simple questions about crime novels from the past. Those questions include:
How was the book received at the time?
How does it read now, decades after publication?

I have departed from the usual format by examining two books, published in 1999 and 2000 by Serpents Tail. They were the first two in a quartet of novels by David Peace (left), which have come to be known as the Red Riding Quartet. The books are set in West Yorkshire, and each references real criminal events of the time

1974 is set in a bleak December in Leeds. Edward Dunford is the crime correspondent for a local paper which publishes daily morning and evening editions. He is keen to make his mark, but is overshadowed by his more experienced predecessor, Jack Whitehead. Mourning the recent death of his father, Dunford covers the abduction of a schoolgirl, Clare Kemplay, whose body is later found sexually assaulted and horrifically mutilated. Wings, torn from a swan in a local park, have been been crudely stitched to the little girl’s back. Dunford is convinced that the killing is connected to earlier missing children, but then his search for answers becomes tangled up with crooked property dealers, blackmail, corrupt politicians and a dystopian police force. Dunford receives several graphically described beatings, there is violent, joyless sex and, in almost constant rain, the neon-lit motorways and carriageways around Leeds and Wakefield take on a baleful presence of their own.

1974 was praised at the time – and still is – for its coruscating honesty and brutal depiction of a corrupt police force, bent businessmen who have, via brown envelopes, local councillors at their beck and call in a city riven by prostitution, racism and casual violence. In a nod to a real life case David Peace has a man called Michael Myshkin, clearly with mental difficulties, arrested for the Clare’s murder. It is obvious that this refers to the ordeal of Stefan Kiszko (right) – arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of Lesley Molseed in 1975. He remained in prison until 1992, but was then acquitted and released after the case was re-examined.

1977 is a re-imagining of the how the Yorkshire Ripper murders began to imprint themselves on the public’s imagination, and baffle police for many years. It is the early summer and we are reunited with many characters from 1974, including Jack Whitehead, DS Bob Fraser and several of the senior police officers who made Eddie Dunford’s life a misery. Apart from the obvious mark of Peace’s style – jagged paragraphs of single figure words, stream of consciousness narrative, fevered sequences of bad dreams and relentless brutality, there are other thematic links. Eddie Dunford’s father has just died, shriveled to a husk by cancer; Bob Fraser’s father in law is just days away from death from the same disease. Both Whitehead and Frazer have their sexual demons, and in Fraser’s case it is a prostitute called Janice who he first arrested, and then became transfixed by. She is murdered, and he is arrested.

When straightforward narrative clarity is abandoned in favour of literary special effects, the downside is that it is sometimes hard work to know who is imaging what. Someone in 1977 is referencing the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and, in particular, the destruction of Mary Jane Kelly in Millers Court. Likewise, someone is using the slightly artificial jollity of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee as a sour counterpoint to the carnage being inflicted on the back streets of Leeds. The novel ends inconclusively, but it seems that both Whitehead and Fraser become the victims of their obsessions.

It is worth looking at the chronology of what I call ‘brutalist’ crime fiction (aka British Noir). The grand-daddy of them all is probably Jack’s Return Home, (1970) later re-imagined as Get Carter, and featuring corrupt businessmen, although there is little or nopolice involvement. This was Ted Lewis’s breakthrough novel, but aficionados will argue that his GBH – a decade later – is even better. 1974 and 1977 are explicit, bleak and visceral, but we would do well to remember that I Was Dora Suarez, the most horrific of Derek Raymond’s Factory novels, was published in 1990, and featured a similar leitmotif to 1974 – that of wounds, pain and suffering. To revisit IWDS click the link below.

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/i-was-dora-suarez/

As compelling as these two novels are, David Peace wasn’t exploring ground unvisited by earlier writers. Tastes and descriptions in crime fiction are all relative. Val McDermid’s excellent Tony Hill/Carol Jordan novels were lauded as visiting dark places where other writers had feared to tread, but they were relatively mild, at least in terms of gore and viscera. Great stories, yes, from a fine writer, but not exactly pushing boundaries. Given the free use of vernacular words to describe ethnicity and sexual preferences, had Peace’s novels been submitted by an unknown writer in 2023, it is improbable that the books would see the light of day, given the cultural eggshells on which mainstream publishers seem to tiptoe.

Final verdict? I’ll answer the two questions I posed at the top of this piece. Firstly, the contemporary reactions were pretty enthusiastic, and included, from Time Out (remember that?):
“The finest work of literature I’ve read this year – extraordinary and original”
The Independent on Sunday enthused:
“Vinnie Jones should buy the film rights fast!”
The Guardian offered:
“A compelling fiction – Jacobean in its intensity.”

They are not wrong about the books, but I suspect that the soundbites were from reviewers who perhaps did not have a very great overview of what had gone before. As for how they read these days, I came to them new, via a Christmas present from my son, and they certainly grab you by the throat. I read both books in two days but did I care very much about what happened to Eddie Dunford, Jack Whitehead or Bob Fraser? Not much, to be honest. The Aeschylean/Shakespearean view of a tragic figure is that he/she is someone who is basically a decent person brought low by a combination of fate and accident. For me, Eddie, Jack and Bob might have appeared to tick the first box, but actually didn’t. The two later books in the quartet were published in 2001(1980) and 2002 (1983) so they fall outside this remit. As for Vinnie Jones buying the film rights, the books were filmed as a trilogy, more or less omitting 1977 altogether. They were broadcast in March 2009.

May 16, 2023 0

THE DEAD WILL RISE . . . Between the covers

Chris Nickson is a former music journalist, and has rubbed shoulders with the Great and The Good across the history of rock music, but in these latter days he has earned a considerable reputation as a historical novelist. His books are mostly centred on Leeds, and they cover different historical periods from the 1730s to the 1950s. His latest book features Georgian thief-taker Simon Westow. Back then, there was no organised police force; the only legal officials were parish constables, who tended to be elderly, infirm and incompetent. Westow is more like the 20th century concept of a Private Eye; he recovers stolen property and catches criminals – for a fee.

Here, he has an unusual assignment; Local factory boss Joseph Clark asks him to find the men who stole the buried corpse of Gwendolyn Jordan, the daughter of Harmony Jordan, one of his employees. The crime of body snatching is unique in that it involved acts of criminality carried out in the name – some might argue – of a greater good, that being anatomical and medical research. Westow wastes no time on moral philosophy, and with his assistant Jane he sets out to find the Resurrection Men.
RESMEN

Jane is, for me, the most compelling character in any of Nickson’s novels. Raped by her father, disowned by her mother, the teenager has made her living on the streets. Not in the conventional sense by selling her body, but by employing preternatural skills of awareness of danger, cunning and speed of thought; most fearsome of all is the fact that she will use her knife without a moment of compassion or hesitation. She is a stone-cold killer, as many men – now dead and buried – would testify, were they still able to.

Westow’s case load becomes more complex when he and Jane are summoned to the elegant mansion of the infamous Mrs Parker – infamous because she is renowned in Leeds for marrying a series of wealthy men, who then die, leaving her with an ever expanding fortune. Just for once, she has been bested. A lover has swindled her out of £50 – over £5000 in today’s money – and she wants recompense.

When the usually invulnerable Jane is bested by one of the thugs involved in the corpse trade, and is hurled from a bridge, she is lucky to escape with cuts and bruises. Her pride is hurt more, though, and she vows vengeance. Eventually the elusive Resurrection Men are tracked down, but Westow and his wife Rosie are convinced that there is one big player in the racket left to catch, and this leads to a thrilling – and unexpected – end to the case,

Nickson’s narrative voice is totally authentic: Simon Westow, his family, and others in his world live and breathe as if they are they were standing with us in the same room. He makes the Leeds of April 1824 as real and vivid as if we had just stepped down from the York stagecoach. The Dead Will Rise is published by Severn House and is out now.