When I began penning my award-winning
debut crime thriller, The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, it never occurred to me that
certain themes would emerge in the writing process over the course of three
books. With a mixed-race heroine of Jamaican descent, racial politics would
always be at the forefront of my mind. Sexuality has also become a real theme –
hardly surprising, since I have an interest in the subject and was poised at
university to follow my Masters with a PhD on the feminist politics of hard
core pornography. Anyone who has read The Girl Who Broke the Rules will know
that fetishism, pornography and the sex industry are intrinsically linked to
the main storyline, which involves the hunt for a brutal killer. Principally,
however, an overarching theme for the series is trafficking.
Always a keen reader of world news, when
I began writing, I realised that the trans-national traffick of drugs, people,
weapons and even exotic animals had embedded itself in my subconscious. I was
fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the tales of criminals’ subterfuge
and victims’ suffering.
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die deals
principally with the illicit trade in drugs and movement of
women across
borders as unpaid sex-workers. The book should throw up certain moral questions
for readers. If a drug user buys heroine on the streets of the UK, does he/she
give any thought to the fact that it has probably been grown in the Helmand and
Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan, lining the pockets of warlords? Growing
poppies for heroine manufacture is more profitable for impoverished opium
farmers than growing food crops, and only Russia seems to have an interest in
destroying those crops.
We’re a nation of recreational drug
takers. If you buy coke on the streets of the UK or US, do you realise that the
countries of Central America act as a transit route for drugs traffickers,
ensuring that violence and corruption in those poverty-stricken areas is
endemic? Where there are drugs, there are arms, too, so the murder rate in
affected countries is ludicrously high, with gang-membership supplanting
family, and criminality becoming more attractive than pursuing education and
employment. Corrupt governments suck dry financial resources that should be used
to support the infrastructure of their countries, thereby exacerbating poverty
in already poor communities. And if the first world drug-destination countries
like the UK and US crack down on Class A drug imports, the traffickers must
make their money from something else – women, children, slave labour, organ
harvesting… If it turns a profit, it’s fair game.
The Girl Who Broke the Rules begins with
a scene where a Somali prostitute is found eviscerated in Amsterdam’s red light
district, but the book is decidedly not a slasher story, with women as victims
of violent sexual predators. I chose to write about slave labour and the
vulnerability of refugees and economic migrants from countries torn apart by
civil war, such as Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Young Somali
men, in particular, are very likely to get embroiled in criminal activity, once
they have reached Europe. With little education and often, no support from
elders, they make easy pickings for gangs.
Perhaps the most disquieting element of trans-national
trafficking is the illicit movement of children across borders. It is this
subject that I tackle in The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows - specifically
highlighting the vulnerability of South Eastern Europe’s Roma communities,
where young people, hoping for a better life and the prospect of work in other
countries, can too easily become entrapped by traffickers as domestic slave labour
or sex workers in Western European. The brothels and nail bars of the UK alone
are populated by young women from Eastern Europe, the Far East and Africa, who
leave their homes in the hope of securing legitimate paid work. Instead, they
find themselves without passports, dependent on their human traffickers and
forced to work for free to pay off a never-dwindling debt.
I hope I’ve created stories and
characters that hold a mirror up to real life. I chose to write international
thrillers, rather than domestic police procedurals, because crime knows no
borders. Its terrible ingenuity is limitless. Where there’s a profit to be
made, there are commodities to be trafficked. It’s a heart-breaking state of
affairs, and we owe it to the victims of trafficking to educate ourselves –
through good fiction, if you’re a fan of crime writing - about their plight and
to avoid contributing to this exploitation of the world’s most vulnerable
citizens.
The Girl Who Broke the Rules by Marnie Riches out now. (HarperCollins)
The Girl Who Broke the Rules by Marnie Riches out now. (HarperCollins)
When
the mutilated bodies of two sex-workers are found in Amsterdam, Chief Inspector
van den Bergen must find a brutal murderer before the red-light-district erupts
into panic. Georgina McKenzie is
conducting research into pornography among the UK’s most violent sex-offenders
but once van den Bergen calls on her criminology expertise, she is only too
happy to come running. The rising death
toll forces George and van den Bergen to navigate the labyrinthine worlds of
Soho strip-club sleaze and trans-national human trafficking. And with the case
growing ever more complicated, George must walk the halls of Broadmoor
psychiatric hospital, seeking advice from the brilliant serial murderer, Dr.
Silas Holm…
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