My books are set in Leeds, Yorkshire, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when this part of the North of England was struggling. My latest novel, The Burning Fears, is set int the latter part of this period – 1982 – when the country was still in shock as the extent of the Yorkshire Ripper’s crimes came to light.
At the same time, wide-spread de-industrialisation across the north saw job losses on a massive scale. It was a city far from the renaissance it enjoyed in the 1990s and 2000s. A visitor to Leeds now, clean and shiny and remade with glass and steel, would not recognise the city from my descriptions.
And this is deliberate.
I believe that readers connect with a story when it is written with love and sense of connection to a place, real or fictional. For fans of crime fiction, the setting where the crimes take place is another, important character. And a story’s setting is just as vital to the substance of the stories as the choice of detective (amateur or professional?) and their characterisation (dour or humorous?).
Importantly, the locale of a book provides an important through line in a crime series. For example, few would argue with the fact that Ann Cleeves’ DI Vera Stanhope’s novels gain much of their atmosphere from the moorland, villages and coastal landscape of Northumberland. Her Shetland novels are similarly evocative.
So, my stories are informed by the dust and industrial grime of a city on the slide. In The Burning Fears, the city’s elite, whose families became rich through the City’s heyday between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century come face to face with the limits of their power and influence.
This is a story of political corruption and the sexual exploitation of minors. Themes which is our society are sadly evergreen. It begins with Lynda, a notorious local sex worker and procurer, lying dead in the snow, apparently the victim of a hit and run driver.
My detecting duo finds themselves entangled with her death when her daughter turns up, now motherless and homeless. This duo is Maureen, Leeds’s leading Madam and owner of Rio’s sauna, and her friend and protector Mick, a middle-age cop worn out and sidelined because of the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation.
Lynda and her daughter’s story collide in unexpected ways with a corrupt local politician and the other members of The Leeds Club, a city centre establishment where the great and good congregate.
The luxury of the Leeds Club (a real private members’ club which stood in the centre of Leeds until the 1990s) contrasts starkly with my portrayal of Leeds as a dirty, damp and poverty-riven place.
This image reflects the seediness of the characters at the heart of the story. By contrast, Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks series is set in the town of Eastvale in the Yorkshire Dales, is almost the mirror image of industrial, West Yorkshire.
However, Robinson and I, along with a surprising number of crime-writing colleagues, don’t live in the places we write about. Robinson spent his career mostly living in Canada. And I relocated to Brighton over a decade ago. So, why write about our hometowns when we don’t even live there?
Robinson is on record declaring that he first wrote Banks as an outlet for his homesickness. However, I grew up in Leeds during the 1970s and 1980s a time of extreme deprivation. Unemployment was rife. The Ripper’s crimes and the inept police investigation had led to a perception of Leeds as a violent city where the police and local authority had lost control. Crime rose sharply, fuelled by both need and greed.
I was a young child then, and don’t clearly remember these privations. And, for me, the reason I write about Leeds is not sentimental. It’s rather because perceptions of Yorkshire became captured by a rural, market town aesthetic.
But the Leeds of my memory is not Last of the Summer Wine, or All Creatures Great and Small, or even the city’s thriving nineteenth century industrial pomp. For me Leeds is a city of the grand Victorian buildings, like the Civic Hall and Leeds’s Market in its centre, rendered black and dirty from grim and dust and the droppings of a million starlings shrieking from their perches on the ornate building’s stone ornamentation.
It is abandoned warehouses running along the River Aire and the Leeds-Liverpool canal, both filthy in my day, full of rubbish and supermarket trollies. Still, as a child I caught tiny fish from this midden in a net on a pole and took them home for my mother to admire.
This was my Leeds; one in which life, criminal, marginal but with its own vitality and fascination, thrived within the filth and merk of a community tainted by grooming and exploitation. There is nothing hopeless about the people in The Burning Fears. There is always a kind of redemption in this city – if the inferno doesn’t claim you first.
The Burning Fears by Katy Massey. (Little Brown) Out Now
Leeds 1982. As a city struggles to break free of the past, evil finds a new place to hide.DS Mick Hunniford, tired and tainted by the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation, is yesterday's man, his career hanging by a thread.Maureen, owner of Leeds's leading brothel, struggles to recover from a horrendous attack three years before. When notorious escort Lynda Brown is killed in front of Maureen's eyes, she and Mick find themselves drawn together once more. The pair must face a new killer, with new appetites, one which dwells among the city's elites. Can they put the past behind them once and for all, even if this investigation proves to be their last?
More information about the author can be found on her website. She can also be found on Insagram @katymassey80, on X @TangledRoots1 and on Facebook.
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