How I remember my hometown in my books by Katy Massey

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.

Right to Kill by John Barlow

My novel Right to Kill began with a chance encounter. It was in Cleckheaton, the West Yorkshire town where I grew up. About nine in the evening, and I was walking back down towards the centre from the library, a route I’d taken countless times when I was a kid. And there, under a disused railway bridge, was a young guy selling drugs. He was just going about his business, nonchalant, a bit of arrogance in his eyes as I walked past. I don’t know why I was so shocked. It’s as easy to get drugs in Yorkshire’s old mill towns as a bag of chips.

The drug culture is pretty much endemic these days, and it’s not even particularly well hidden anymore. Yet there’s a whole world of depravity lying beneath it, a semi-submerged part of modern life that leaves squalor, addiction and victims in its wake. So I asked myself, what would happen if someone just killed him? What if someone took offence at his presence, the assumed normality of him standing there, unchallenged, cocky, and decided to do something about it, on the spur of the moment?

I think the truth is that the murder of a low-level drug pusher isn’t likely to have much of an emotional impact on us at all. It’s not like the tragic death of a child, or the murder of an innocent victim of crime. Probably wouldn’t even warrant a headline in the Yorkshire Post. And that’s what attracted me to the idea. Do we see all human life as equally valuable, every murder as equally worthy of our compassion? No, I don’t think we do. You’d need a special kind of copper to see the deep human tragedy in a death like this.

Cue Joe Romano, a half-Sicilian police detective based in Leeds. Joe is tasked with finding out who killed this small-time drug dealer. The murder seems to have been spontaneous, unusual in its mode of violence, and lacks an obvious motive. Joe’s colleagues show little interest in the case, and many members of the public in fact applaud the killer. But Joe believes that every life matters, especially after he gets to know the victim’s mother. When he’s joined by the bolshie, foul-mouthed DS Rita Hridi Scannon-Aktar from Batley, the investigation takes on a new dimension. Especially when the victim appears to have had links to a group of far-right, racist vigilantes.

What I found fascinating about setting a novel in Leeds and the mill towns of West Yorkshire was how the atmosphere of these towns has changed over the last decade or so. When I grew up here, the area was standard ‘north’, part of Labour’s red wall. But recently it also saw a huge pro-Brexit vote, and it was where Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered, apparently in the name of ‘English nationalism’. The red wall is crumbling, and there’s a tension, an undercurrent of racism, a sense of things having lost focus. Just the kind of context in which a vigilante killer might receive popular support. And when a second victim is discovered, Joe Romano has a tough job convincing anybody that justice needs to be done.

My family are all from Leeds. I wanted to write a novel set in the city, not least because I really love the place, its elegance and self-assuredness, Lewis’s, Harvey Nicks, the lions outside the Town Hall… There’s a nineteenth-century grandeur and charm to the city centre: big but not boastful. However, as I wrote Right to Kill I was drawn to the mill towns to the south, Cleckheaton, Batley, Dewsbury… Joe Romano is from Leeds, a real city boy. Although the murders take place just a dozen miles away, it’s as if he's taking the reader with him out of the city to somewhere less familiar.

The second book in the series, To the Grave, also explores these contrasts, moving from the Porsche-spattered, millionaire-infested greenbelt of leafy northern Leeds, to the shadowy world of illegal workers in the run-down and sometimes grim mill towns nearby. Rugby league rather than Premiership football.

In the end, I think that’s what I find most enjoyable about West Yorkshire as a setting for crime fiction. It’s the variety, the quick-fire contrasts, the sense that everything is happening in close proximity to everything else. You can go from pockets of idyllic greenery to noir-ish abandoned factories in a matter of minutes. Plus, there’s the people. Friendly but not flamboyant, with an understated wit. Writing about the north makes for great dialogue. Although, since southerners are also allowed to read it, we had to tone down the accents a bit, tha’ knows.

John Barlow’s RIGHT TO KILL is published in paperback on 4th February, 2022, by HQ/HarperCollins.

On a Thursday night in February, DS Joe Romano finds himself back on home turf in Wortley, West Leeds. He's following up on the disappearance of drug dealer Craig Shaw. It's the start of a case that could make or break Romano's career. Because Shaw is about to go from missing to murdered. While some don't think Shaw's killer should be brought to justice, Romano believes every life counts. But he's running out of time. The killer is ready to strike again. And Romano will be forced to question whether anyone has the right to kill.

TO THE GRAVE is published on 24th May, 2022

When DS Joe Romano first meets Ana Dobrescu she's nervous, in serious danger, and clearly needs help. The next time Romano sees her, she's dead. There was nothing more he could have done, but that's cold comfort for Romano. He's determined to catch Ana's killer. Although the prime suspect, her millionaire boyfriend, is in a coma. With the help of his larger-than-life partner Rita Scannon-Aktar, Romano begins to piece together a puzzle that places Ana at the centre of something much bigger than they could have imagined. But while they're hunting a murderer, those higher up are more concerned about the money. So it's up to Romano to get justice for Ana. And whatever she knew, he'll just have to pray that she didn't take her secrets to the grave.

More information about John Barlow can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @John_Barlow_LS9 and on Facebook