Ajay Close on What Doesn't Kill Us.

I was 15 in 1975 when Peter Sutcliffe killed his first victim, and 21 when he was caught in Sheffield, about a mile from my home. My teenage years were coloured by the folk culture that sprang up around the 13 murders: graffiti, urban legends, football terrace chants, sick jokes. A young woman in the north of England who walked home alone at night, I was his target demographic.

 

Although Sutcliffe died in 2020, those years live on in the memories of countless women. Many of us have stories to tell. As a novelist, I often use personal experience as the starting point for my fiction. But fiction inspired by the Sutcliffe case is a sensitive matter. There’s a risk of trampling over private tragedy, or even being accused of exploiting it. These days we see fame as the ultimate prize. A twisted individual like Sutcliffe doesn’t deserve to be remembered. Then there’s the whole question of why – why write about it, why read it? No one wants to pander to the sort of person titillated by attacks on vulnerable women.  

Even that nickname is controversial. In the late 70s the term ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was everywhere: on television and radio, in newspaper headlines and on newsagents’ bills. Now It’s suspect because of its ‘dark glamour.’ When ITV was making a seven-part drama about the police investigation and the impact of the murders on victims’ families, members of those families lobbied to prevent ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ from appearing in the title. The series was broadcast last autumn as The Long Shadow.

However understandable that decision, I wouldn’t want to see the term added to our list of taboo vocabulary. This is about much more than Peter Sutcliffe. The words ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ are an evocative shorthand for a social history we’re not yet ready to forget.

Millions of women across the north of England lived through the 70s. Plenty of us were enraged by the incompetence of the police, the curfew effectively imposed on single women, the sexist attitudes of the detectives who appeared on the nightly news. (Memories refreshed by the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 and ongoing reports of police abusing their power over women.) Domestic violence was rife. Some wives were so frightened of their husbands they shopped them to the Ripper tip-off line. Any woman who didn’t own a car and couldn’t afford taxis had to make a choice. She could stay in night after night, letting a man she had never met put her under house arrest. Or she could insist on her right to a social life, accepting that walking home alone was akin to playing Russian roulette.

Like most women I knew, I was terrified after dark, constantly looking over my shoulder, suspicious of every man I passed. Writing about that time is a longstanding ambition. I have absolutely zero interest in the psychology of Peter Sutcliffe, but I’m fascinated by how society reacted to his crimes. Sutcliffe was a stick that stirred up a lot of very nasty sediment.

So yes, I’ve written a novel, but no, the killer is not Peter Sutcliffe, and the victims are not ciphers for the women he murdered over those six years. PC Liz Seeley and her superiors are not the actual Ripper Squad detectives, even if the plot borrows aspects of the bungled police investigation. (You couldn’t make it up!) Likewise, the militant separatists who fight back against male supremacy and offer Liz a refuge from her violent boyfriend are not the real Leeds Revolutionary Feminists. What Doesn’t Kill Us is a historical novel set in a very different Britain – but not all the evils it depicts are safely in the past.

What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close (Saraband) Out Now 

A killer stalks the streets of Leeds. Every man is a suspect. Every woman is at risk. But in a house on Cleopatra Street, women are fighting back. It’s the eve of the 1980s. PC Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine – young, Black, artistic, and fighting discrimination on two fronts. As the list of victims grows and police fail to catch the killer, women across the north are too terrified to go out after dark. To the feminists, the Butcher is a symptom of wider misogyny. Their anger finds an outlet in violence and Liz is torn between loyalty to them and her duty as a police officer. Which way will she jump? What Doesn’t Kill Us combines the tension of a police procedural with the power and passion of the women’s lib movement. By turns emotional, action-packed and darkly funny, it reveals just how much the world has changed since the 1970s – and how much it hasn’t.

More information about the author can be found on her website . You can also follow her on X at @AjayClose and on FaceBook.