Yorkshire

SECRETS ON THE FELLS . . . Between the covers

Whatever sights the silent stones of Fountains Abbey had witnessed over the centuries from its creation by the Normans to its ruination by Henry VIII, a butchered corpse was probably not among their number. But when Yorkshire cops Di Leo Donovan and DC Shan Young are called out to the stately ruins one bitter winter night, that is just what they find. Patrick Armitage, college lecturer, his body ravaged by knife wounds, his lips frozen in the rictus of death, had been on site earlier, directing the dress rehearsal of a musical.

Now, with all the actors, singers and technicians long gone, he lies dead, with the arterial spray from his wounds staining one of the ancient pillars of the nave. Donovan and Young are an interesting pair. Donovan, much Young’s senior, is beginning to feel the onset of arthritis, but has other pains, the principle one being that of the shattered relationship with Luke, his son, who is doing prison time for a hate crime, brought to light by his father’s diligence. Young is of Chinese heritage with adoptive parents, and is in a same sex relationship. She and her partner have one failed IVF pregnancy behind them, but they hope for better things.

As is often the way with police procedurals, early suspects seem to be eliminated for one reason or another, and the investigation stalls. Donovan likens the process to one of those fairground grab machines where the prize seems almost in reach before the claws slip and close on thin air. In murder fiction, families are rarely what they seem to be, and so it is here. Armitage’s brother Max is a drunk, obsessed with pursuing an ever-more-elusive fortune by dabbling in crypto currency. And is Bree, Armitage’s wife, the distraught widow she seems to be?

The investigation takes a dramatic turn when a teenage girl, Rosie, one of the stars of the now abandoned musical goes missing. Donovan and Young have discovered that some years earlier, Armitage had been involved, apparently innocently, with a female student, Janelle, who had developed a huge crush on him. Is the disappearance of Rosie history repeating itself? Did the charismatic – and handsome – college lecturer somehow fall foul of yet another teenage obsession?

In some ways, this novel is nothing out of the ordinary in the genre, in that the procedural details are convincing, and the main characters are well drawn. For me, however, the stand-out quality is the vibrancy of the setting; the towering and gaunt majesty of the ruined abbey, the sharp frosts making the tall grasses sparkle on the wintry lanes, and the sheer endurance of the local limestone in the old farms and field walls. Against this backdrop, Cath Staincliffe has written a crime novel which involves readers from the very first paragraph and keeps us guessing until the very end.

I don’t use the star system on my site for the reason that it is too blunt a tool, and I prefer to convey my views with more nuance. Commercial sites like Amazon, Netgalley and Goodreads do have the star system, and I generally play safe and award three or four. Here, though, I will be going for five. In addition to the wonderful topographical background, Cath Staincliffe mines deep into human joy and sorrow. Donovan’s heartbreak at the total breakdown of his the relationship with his son, Young’s paralysing anxiety over her own identity and the health of her adoptive father, and the devastating effects of violent crime on families – each is described unflinchingly, but with a huge sense of compassion. Secrets On The Fells is published by Joffe Books and available now.

September 17, 2026 0

MURDER AT HOLLY HOUSE . . . Between the covers

The novel is subtitled The Memoirs of Inspector Frank Grasby, and Denzil Meyrick (left) employs the reliable plot-opener of someone in our time inheriting a wooden crate containing the papers of a long-dead police officer, and exploring what was committed to paper. Will crime writers in a hundred years hence have their characters discovering a forgotten folder in the corner of someone’s hard drive? I doubt it – it won’t be anywhere near as much fun.

We are in December 1952, although the book starts with an intriguing police report from three years earlier, the significance of which becomes apparent later. Frank Grasby is in his late thirties, saw one or two bad things during his army service, but is now with Yorkshire police, based in York. He is a good copper, albeit with a weakness for the horses, but has made one or two recent blunders for which his punishment is to be sent of the remote village of Elderby, perched up on the North Yorkshire moors. Ostensibly he is there to investigate some farm thefts, but the Chief Constable just wants him out of harm’s way – and the public eye – for a month or two.

Meyrick unashamedly borrows a few ideas from elsewhere. Rather like Lord Peter Wimsey’s car getting stuck in the snow at the beginning of The Nine Tailors, Grasby’s battered police Austin A30 gives up the ghost just short of the village as the snow swirls down, and he has to make the rest of the journey on foot. In Elderby he finds, in no particular order:

♣ A pub called The Hanging Beggar.
♣ Police Sergeant Bleakly – in charge of the local nick, but afflicted with narcolepsy due to his grueling time with the Chindits in Burma.
♣ A delightful American criminology student called Daisy Dean.
♣ A bumptious nouveau-riche ‘Lord of the Manor’ called Damnish (a former tradesman from Leeds, ennobled for his support of the government).
♣ A strange woman called Mrs Gaunt, with whom Grasby and Daisy lodge. Mrs G has a pet raven that sits on her shoulder, and seems to have a mysterious connection to Grasby’s father, an elderly clergyman.

The first corpse enters neither stage right nor left, but rather stage above, when Grasby inadvertently solves Lord Damnish’s smoky fireplace by dislodging an obstruction – a recently deceased male corpse. Next, the American husband of the local GP is found dead in the churchyard. Chuck Starr was a journalist embedded with the Allied forces on D-Day, was appalled by what he saw, and has been writing an exposé on military incompetence. His manuscript – yes, you guessed it – has gone missing.

The more Grasby tugs and frets away at a series of loose ends, the more the fabric of Elderby – as a jolly bucolic paradise inhabited by a few harmless eccentrics – begins to unravel and our man finds himself in the middle of a potentially catastrophic conspiracy.

Some crime novels lead us to thinking dark thoughts about the human condition, while others delight us with their ingenuity, humour and turns of phrase. This is definitely in the latter category but, amidst the entertainment, Meyrick reminds us that war leaves mental scars that can be much slower to heal than their physical counterparts. He takes the threads of familiar and comfortable crime fiction tropes, and weaves a Christmas mystery in a snowy village, but with the shadows of uneasy post-war international alliances darkening the fabric. Murder at Holly House is beautifully written, full of sharp humour, but it is also a revealing portrait of the political tensions rife in 1950s Britain. It is published by Bantam and is available now.

November 28, 2023 0

CRIME ACROSS ENGLAND . . . 3: Scunthorpe and Leeds

A trip to Scunthorpe might not be too high on many people’s list of literary pilgrimages, but we are calling in for a very good reason, and that is because it was the probable setting for one of the great crime novels, which was turned into a film which regularly appears in the charts of “Best Film Ever”. I am talking about Jack’s Return Home, better known as Get Carter. Hang on, hang on – that was in Newcastle wasn’t it? Yes, the film was, but director Mike Hodges recognised that Newcastle had a more gritty allure in the public’s imagination than the north Lincolnshire steel town, which has long been the butt of gags in the stage routine of stand-up comedians.

Author Ted Lewis (right) was actually born in Manchester in 1940, but after the war his parents moved to Barton-on-Humber, just fourteen miles from Scunthorpe. Lewis crossed the river to attend Art college in Hull before moving to London to work as an animator. His novels brought him great success but little happiness, and after his marriage broke up, he moved back to Lincolnshire to live with his mother. By then he was a complete alcoholic and he died of related causes in 1982. His final novel GBH (1980) – which many critics believe to be his finest – is played out in the bleak out-of-season Lincolnshire coastal seaside resorts which Lewis would have known in the sunnier days of his childhood. In case you were wondering about how Jack’s Return Home is viewed in the book world, you can pick up a first edition if you have a spare £900 or so in your back pocket.

There is a rather arcane conversation to be had about the original name Jack’s Return Home. Yes, Carter’s name is Jack, and he returns to his home town to investigate the death of his brother. But take a look at a scene in the film. Carter visits his late brother’s house, and amid the books and LPs strewn about, there is a very visible copy of a Tony Hancock record, Check out the discography of Tony Hancock LPs, and you will find a recording of The East Cheam Drama Festival and one of the plays – a brilliantly spoof of a Victorian melodrama – is called …….. Jack’s Return Home.

You can find out much more about Ted Lewis and his books by clicking the image below.

Before we leave the delights of ‘Scunny’, here’s a pub quiz question. Three England captains played for which Lincolshire football team? The answer, of course, is Scunthorpe United. The three captains?
Kevin Keegan – Scunthorpe 1966-71, England captain 1976-82
Ray Clemence – Scunthorpe 1965-67, England captain once, in a friendly against Brazil
Ian Botham – Scunthorpe 1980-85, England (cricket) captain 1980-81

Ouch! Anyway, back to crime fiction and we start up the Bentley and head into darkest Yorkshire to meet a policeman and his family in the city of Leeds.

Does Chris Nickson preach? Absolutely not. This is the beauty of the Tom Harper books. No matter what the circumstances, we trust Harper’s judgment, and we can only be grateful that the struggles and sacrifices that he and his wife endured paid – eventually – dividends. The books are relatively short, but always vibrant with local historical detail, and I swear that I my eyes itch with the tang of effluent from the tanneries, and the sulphurous smoke from the foundries. We also meet real people like Herbert Asquith, Jennie Baines and Frank Kitson. Chris Nickson takes them from the dry pages of the history books and allows our imagination to bring them to life. For detailed reviews of some of the Tom Harper books, click the author’s image (left)

November 2, 2021 0

THE TIN GOD . . . Between the covers

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“And the guardians and their ladies,
Although the wind is east,
Have come in their furs and wrappers,
To watch their charges feast;
To smile and be condescending,
Put pudding on pauper plates.
To be hosts at the workhouse banquet
They’ve paid for — with the rates.”

Verse two of the celebrated – and often parodied – ballad poem by the Victorian campaigning journalist George R Sims, In The Workhouse, Christmas Day. Most of us older folk know the poem and its melancholy message. An old man is sitting down to his Christmas dinner in the workhouse, but one memory is too much for him, and he angrily relates the tale of his late wife, who was forced to die of hunger on the streets because of the harshness of the workhouse regulations. The relevance of this to Chris Nickson’s The Tin God lies in the first line of the verse above, because the heroine of the story is the wife of Leeds copper Tom Harper, and she is standing for election to the workhouse Board of Guardians.

So? This Leeds in October 1897, and women simply did not stand for office of any kind, and when Annabelle Harper, along with several colleagues from the fledgling Suffrage movement decide to enter the election, it is a controversial decision, because the concept of women migrating from their proper places, be they the bedroom, the withdrawing room or the kitchen, is anathema to most of the ‘gentlemen’ in Leeds society.

Outraged leading articles appear in local newspapers, but someone believes that the sword – or something equally violent – is mightier than the pen, and a homemade bomb destroys a church hall just before Annabelle Harper is due to speak to her supporters. The caretaker is tragically killed by the explosion, and matters go from bad to worse when more bombs are found, and several of the women candidates are threatened.

Superintendent Tom Harper is already involved in investigating the criminal aspects of the case, but when the husband of one of the women is murdered while sitting at his own kitchen table, the affair becomes a hunt for a murderer. The killer leaves a few tantalising clues, and Harper becomes conflicted between devoting every hour that God sends to tracking down the killer – and keeping his wife from becoming the next victim.

Nickson drops us straight onto the streets of his beloved Leeds. We smell the stench of the factories, hear the clatter of iron-shod hooves on the cobbles, curse when the soot from the chimneys blackens the garments on our washing lines and – most tellingly – we feel the pangs of hunger gnawing at the bellies of the impoverished. We have an intriguing sub-plot involving a smuggling gang importing illegal spirits into Leeds, authentic dialogue, matchless historical background and, best of all, a few hours under the spell of one of the best story tellers in modern fiction.

Kidson

You want more? Well, it’s there. Nickson is a fine musician and a distinguished music journalist, and he cunningly works into the plot one of the more notable musical names associated with Leeds and West Yorkshire, the folksong collector Frank Kidson (above). The killer shares Kidson’s passion for the old songs – if not his humanity and feelings for his fellow human beings – and he leaves handwritten fragments of English songs at the scenes of his attacks.

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The Tin God is published by Severn House and is available now. It will be obvious that I am a great admirer of Chris Nickson’s writing, and if you click the images below, you can read the reviews for some of his other excellent novels.