Reading Peace, Writing Granite by Nina Allan

‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak, a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup, the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad? Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the Final!’

My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United. The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been. But she remembered Munich. 

On the afternoon of February 6th 1948, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover. 

At the time of the Munich Air Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly – about grief.

British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home. 

Peace evokes a world in which it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone, where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch winning matches just a fortnight later. 

When you look at photos of Matt Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they were burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.

There are intimations in Munichs of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place. 

In some ways, what happened at Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time, and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that? 

There has to be something in this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing. 

There is also the broader question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.

I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened. Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal, personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been cut short. 

Peace’s present tense narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’ families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers, even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning of the novel’s title. 

Peace never feels the need to use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay, so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines, the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets when they are put together in a particular way. 

Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual, repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all of the Dead, including his dad.

I kept reading around David Peace before I actually read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were serious, at least if you had taste. 

Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’

I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter. 

Neither could I help noticing that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho, in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy. James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve. 

I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with. 

I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.

In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions. 

“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news. 

“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.

From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford – 

Silence in the black of the back of the van – 

Dim lights down black back roads – 

Sat in the back of the black of the van – 

Yorkshire, 1972:

You’ll wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before. 

When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition, though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some sense formed it. 

He brought to it also some of the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers, whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection: Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the sequence moves forward. 

The material by itself is challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows, staining the paper like mould. 

You can feel it being written.

I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry. She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar landscape. 

I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA. 

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

There was something about Eliot’s images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material, even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.

As an adolescent, Peace harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.

Finding a path towards your material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different. Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative as it developed.

Every novel is a set of problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away. 

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

A Granite Silence is an exploration - a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father. Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen's neighbours: the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts. Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again. Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen's disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood - where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight - and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history. Full of echoes, allusions and eerie diversions, A Granite Silence is an investigation into a notorious true crime case, but also a stylish, imaginative inquiry into who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and why.

Nina Allan is a highly acclaimed and inventive novelist and short story writer, whose work has won multiple prizes including the Novella Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. A Granite Silence won the prestigious CWA Historical Dagger Award and was long-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. More information about Nina Allan can be found on her website.

 

Call for Papers

True Crime and Ethics Symposium

University of Portsmouth

29th May 2026

True crime is a mercurial genre. It shifts, adapts and transforms with and to the popular mediums, motivations and social concerns of the day. From high-budget, horror-infused dramatisations to self-shot Mukbangs, to unmissable Netflix series and 3-minute TikToks, the genre continues to fill production schedules, streaming platforms and social media feeds. Yet, as true crime’s influence has grown, so too have questions about its ethical implications. How should the makers of true crime frame these tragedies, and how should audiences respond to these images of death, abuse and grief? Who has the right to tell true crime stories, and is their commodification worth the very real trauma they can cause? How are social inequities related to gender, race and disability represented in true crime narratives? 

As the genre continues to engage new audiences in innovative ways, its ethical questions become more complex. This one-day symposium, featuring a keynote lecture by Professor Tanya Horeck (author of Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era), will bring scholars together to consider these issues with the aim of developing an edited collection. 

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on topics that explore true crime and ethics. Topics can include but are by no means limited to:

• Gender, ethics and true crime
• Race, ethics and true crime
• Disability, ethics and true crime
• Class, ethics and true crime
• The body in true crime
• Fictionalising true crime (from dramatisations such as Netflix’s Monster series or The Staircase miniseries to amateur-created fan fiction)
• Ethics of internet sleuthing
• True crime on different platforms (streaming, podcasts, and social media)
• Ethics and true crime fandom/audiences
• Survivor/victim-centred true crime
• True crime and social movements (#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, etc.)
• The ethics of true crime aesthetics (from text to paratexts) 
• True crime narrative tropes 

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words along with a short biography by 2nd March 2026 to Dr Simon Hobbs and/or Dr Megan Hoffman at the University of Portsmouth. 

simon.hobbs2@port.ac.uk

megan.hoffman@port.ac.uk

Applicants will be informed on or before 20th March 2026.

This symposium is open to all academics and researchers who are interested in true crime and will be in person only. Registration will be free, and lunch will be provided. A number of £50 travel bursaries will be available for precariously employed academics/independent scholars/PhD students. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these travel bursaries. 

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Simon Hobbs and/or Dr Megan Hoffman on the above emails. 

Where True Crime Meets Jane Austen, by Jessica Bull

The Miss Austen Investigates series is my tribute to Jane Austen, telling the story of her life and work through the format of a murder mystery. I really wanted to capture the vibrant, witty, and joyfully irreverent woman I believe Austen was. I also wanted to tell her story, because it’s tempting to conflate Austen with her more privileged heroines and imagine her path to success was easy. 

All the things that stand in the way of her investigations are the same obstacles she faced in becoming a published author, and the unique qualities which enabled her genius in real life (such as her sense of justice, an innate understanding of human nature and a determination to succeed) allow her to solve the mysteries in my novels.

In this second instalment, a broken-hearted Jane Austen travels to Kent to look after her brother Neddy’s children and further her writing. She soon realizes it’s imperative she uncovers the true identity of a mysterious young woman claiming to be a shipwrecked foreign princess before the interloper can swindle Neddy’s adoptive mother out of her fortune and steal the much-anticipated inheritance all the Austen’s rely on.

As well Austen, there is another fascinating historical figure who inspired this novel. In 1817, a former servant girl, Mary Baker (née Willcocks), persuaded a Gloucester magistrate and his wife she was Princess Caraboo of the fictional island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean, and that she had been captured by pirates and escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Channel and swimming ashore.

Her ruse was eventually discovered but, rather than prosecute, Mary’s benefactress gave her some money to start afresh in America. Everyone who knew Mary said she loved to tell stories. It made me wonder, if Mary had been born into the class of women who were fortunate enough to receive an education, would she be remembered as another Jane Austen?

A Fortune Most Fatal will be published by Penguin Michael Joseph on 27 March 2025. Who are you, Miss Austen, but a young lady of little experience and no consequence?’ Welcome to Godmersham Park, 1797. Following many years apart, Jane Austen is set to spend the summer with her estranged brother, Neddy. As heir to wealthy widow Mrs Knight’s fortune, it is imperative that Neddy stays in his benefactor’s good graces. But upon arrival in Kent, Jane quickly realises Neddy is in dire need of her help. For a mysterious young woman named Eleanor currently resides with Mrs Knight – a stranger who threatens to swindle the inheritance for herself. Jane must uncover who Mrs Knight’s guest really is, to protect the fate of her entire family. When she discovers a series of threatening letters meant for Eleanor, her investigation takes an unexpected turn. Because the dangers aren’t just within the walls of Godmersham Park. Jane knows someone else is out there watching, waiting – but for what? Is this curious Eleanor friend, or foe? And can Jane solve the mystery, before danger comes for them all?

Jessica Bull lives in Southeast London with her husband and two daughters. A former librarian and communications consultant, she studied English literature at Bristol University and information science at City, University of London. A Fortune Most Fatal is the second novel in the Miss Austen Investigates series.

More information about Jessica Bull can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram @ jessicabullnovelist, on Facebook @JessicaBullAuthor and on Bluesky @jessicabull.bsky.social

Buy your copy: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-fortune-most-fatal-jessica-bull/7703849?ean=9780241642115

Mary Horlock on The Safest Place in the World.

‘There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.’

So thought Dr. Armstrong, one of the characters in Agatha Christie’s classic novel And Then There Were None. The story is now familiar: a group of strangers are invited to a mysterious island where they are then stranded and killed off one by one. It’s a kind of locked-room mystery, but by using the setting of on an island, cut off from the rest of the world, Christie increases her characters’ isolation, ramping up the atmosphere of fear and paranoia. 

To re-read the novel now it’s surprisingly dark, but islands can be dark, and I think I’m allowed to say that since I’ve lived on two. They are these fragments of land adrift from the wider world, always a little out of step with it. Whether it’s a tropical haven or a windswept stretch of rock, an island is a border, exposed to the sea on all sides. To be able to see your limits should be reassuring and novels set on islands, particularly crime novels, have that comforting lure. The natural boundaries of cliff and shore shape and contain the narrative. We have a set number of people and places. It is like a puzzle or a game, and also, like a smaller version of our own world. We can put it under the microscope, poke it and prod it and pull it apart. 

But the limits are a danger, too. The island is at the mercy of the elements and can throw up all kinds of surprises: a bad storm, something strange on the beach. In And Then There Were None, just like in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or more recently Alex Garland’s The Beach, our characters find themselves on an island that is not their home, and with life’s normal rules suspended, things quickly fall apart. 

Inevitably perhaps, I’m interested in islanders as much as islands. Islanders often feel like outsiders. By choice or birth, they live on the fringes. This makes them good observers and also, narrators. My father’s family were from the Isle of Wight, and my grandmother, who lived in house looking out over the Solent, would regale me with stories of wreckers and smugglers who were apparently my ancestors. 

When I was seven we moved to Guernsey, an even smaller island in the English Channel. ‘There’s no crime on Guernsey,’ my mother would say (which is often what someone says in a crime novel just before they die). But she’d then point out - quite rightly, I should add - that on a tiny island where everyone knows everyone else, why bother to commit a crime when you’d be swiftly caught? To me, that sounded rather like an invitation. 

My new novel, The Stranger’s Companion, is based on a true crime, a real-life mystery that happened on the island of Sark in 1933. Now Sark, to those who don’t know, is an island even smaller than Guernsey. It measures three and half miles long and has no cars or streetlights to this day. In 1933 it had a population of 500, two telephones and only three wireless sets on the whole island. Unsurprisingly, it had become a haven for shell-shocked veterans of the last War, and was regularly advertised as the perfect place to escape the more ‘disturbing elements of modern civilisation.’ Then the clothes of a man and woman were found on a cliff edge, with no sign of their owners. Despite days-long searches over the cliffs and coves, nobody was found and nobody was reported missing. It caused quite a sensation in the press precisely because it seemed so unlikely. Sark was ‘the Island Where Nothing Ever Happens’ and yet something obviously had. 

The story and the way it caught everyone’s attention points to the truth at the heart of island mysteries - whether real or invented. We think we are on safe ground, but we’re not. Bad things happen everywhere, sometimes in places where we least expect them to happen. All we can do is create the frame to contain and make sense of them.

The Stranger's Companion by Mary Horlock (John Murray/Baskerville) Out Now.

October 1933. With a population of five hundred souls, isolated Sark has a reputation for being 'the island where nothing ever happens'. Until, one day, the neatly folded clothes of an unknown man and woman are discovered abandoned at a coastal beauty spot. As the search for the missing couple catches the attention of first the local and then national newspapers, Sark finds itself front-page news. When young islander Phyllis Carey returns to Sark from England she throws herself into solving the mystery. As Phyll digs through swirls of gossip, ghost stories and dark rumours in search of the truth, she crosses paths with Everard Hyde, a surprise visitor from her past. As press coverage builds to fever pitch, long-suppressed secrets from Phyll's and Everard's shared, shadowy history begin to surface.

More information may be found on her website. 

Social, Cultural and Political climate of Victorian England

How the social, cultural and political climate of Victorian England combined to create a perfect storm of crime, murder and sensationalism.

Kim Donovan, author of The Mysterious Mrs Hood, provides the historical backdrop to her great -great aunt’s murder in 1900.

England 1898 --It has been ten years since Jack the Ripper terrorised the streets of Whitechapel, London. Charles Booth and his team of socialists have been working on a project to map wealth and poverty across the city since 1886, and have recently named Stockwood Street, which was home to Mary Jane and Herbert Bennett, as being one of the ‘lowest class’ streets in Victorian London. It was at this point that Mary Jane and Herbert made a choice: to turn to crime to escape poverty. Mary Jane’s desperate struggle for survival had begun.

Charles Booth’s work would eventually result in a colour-coded map of the city, which carved out and demarcated the poorest streets with thick black lines. Booth classified these areas as being home to the ‘lowest classes.’ The notebooks that accompany Booth’s poverty map add vivid detail about the social character of each street, which helps to give us a sense of the conditions in which people were living at the time. Stockwood Street, a dingy thoroughfare off Plough Street, near Clapham Junction, was described as being awash with ‘drunken, rowdy and troublesome people’. It is easy to imagine the danger that may have lurked on the ‘vicious and semi-criminal’ street after dark. It is no surprise, then, that a heavily pregnant Mary Jane would have urgently sought to liberate herself from these challenging social conditions.

The researchers documenting the conditions on London’s streets would at times be accompanied by the police officer for the district in which they were charting. It was a time when officers walked their beats. Forensic science was in its infancy, and the police still relied heavily on clues to solve crimes. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Scotland Yard had been set up ten years before, and plain clothed police officers, who had originally been thought of as ‘spies’ had made significant strides in winning the trust of the public. Despite this more robust police force, Mary Jane and Herbert would successfully evade the scrutiny of the authorities as they travelled across the country, graduating from fraud to theft, and eventually to arson, while leaving a trail of disgruntled people in their wake.

When relations between the couple eventually began to sour, it is unlikely that they would have considered divorce. Although legal by that time, divorce was expensive and brought with it great shame, especially for women. Mary Jane would have been dependent on her marriage for reasons of reputation, and she would have been reliant on her husband for money.

Despite the great swathes of black on Booth’s map of London, social conditions across the country were being to improve. The Bank holiday Act of 1871 had introduced four regular bank holidays, which gave workers more time for leisure activities, and the development of the railways made it possible to travel longer distances with more ease. Seaside resorts had begun to spring up, and Great Yarmouth in particular became a popular holiday destination. It was here, on a holiday with her infant daughter in September 1900, that Mary Jane would meet her tragic end.

This increase in leisure time coincided with a rise in literacy levels and the development of a more affordable and less regulated press, which, in turn, led to a dramatic rise in newspaper readership. The Victorians had a reputation for being avid consumers of violent entertainments, and a new-fangled form of journalism dubbed ‘Tabloid Journalism’, or ‘Yellow Journalism’ (in North America) had started to develop. Articles in this style had a focus on bold headlines, emotive writing and sensationalist stories. They were, broadly speaking, a development of the Broadside, a type of street literature that had been infamously sold at public executions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The sensationalist reporting of crime was at odds with a legal system that required impartiality, and there were calls at the turn of the 20th Century to regulate the press through fear that sensationalist reporting would prejudice active cases. It was into this press that the story of Mary Jane’s murder found its way, and it was through a newspaper report that her father would learn of his daughter’s murder. The press whipped up such a frenzy around the case that the ensuing trial attracted attention from across the country and Mary Jane Bennett became a household name. She had escaped poverty, and her desperate struggle for survival had come to an end, but not in the way she would have hoped for.

The Mysterious Mrs Hood by Kim Donovan (Orion Publishing) Out Now

A true Victorian murder mystery... Great Yarmouth, September 1900: A young woman is found dead on the beach, a bootlace tied tightly around her neck. Despite her death attracting national attention in the press, nobody claims her. Detective Inspector Robert Lingwood of the Great Yarmouth police force declares he will not rest until the mystery of the young woman's death is solved. But it's only once the case has been referred to Scotland Yard that the layers of mystery start to peel away... 'Mrs Hood' was in fact Mary Jane Bennett, and this is her story. Following clues and tracking red herrings leads the police to close in on their one and only suspect. With arson, fraud, an affair and a sensation-hungry press, the murder gripped the nation in one of the most eagerly anticipated trials of the early twentieth century.

Kim Donovan can be found on X @Kim_Donovan_

Extract from Devil's Coin by Jennifer McAdam

“Have you ever heard of digital currency, Jen, Bitcoin?” asked my best friend Eileen.

I was facing a bleak situation then: I was unwell. I was having relapses and had to take to my bed and draw the blinds to create a blackout, as the light burned my eyes. Sometimes I wore sunglasses in bed. I wasn’t fit to work for another employer because of the way the ME just took the feet from underneath me, but I didn’t even have the energy to be my own boss. I couldn’t commit to clients. I’d lost everything I had because of ME and I just wanted the chance to invest my dad’s money for my son and keep it safe for him and his wee family. Eileen knew where I was at and she told me, “I think you should take a look at this—you should at least speak to Rex.”

I remembered some of my IT clients had mentioned Bitcoin before and I said to myself, “Digital currency, I’ve heard of Bitcoin, I think I will speak to him.” I asked Eileen to give him my phone number. He called me the same day. His name was Rex Charles. He described himself as a “wealth strategist.” He was enthusiastic but not pushy. He explained about digital currency and how this investment opportunity was growing in value faster than Bitcoin.

“For you to really understand it, I definitely recommend that you go to a webinar.”

And there was one that night!

He asked, “Would you like to jump on? I’ll send you the invite link.”

I said, “Aye, do that, that’d be great.”

I joined the webinar that evening, and this pleasant lady named Sally Losa was hosting it. It lasted for about an hour and a half. There must have been about another hundred people or more on that webinar. It was ninety minutes of OneCoin marketing, which explained the Bitcoin story, how it had soared in value, and Sally explained what digital currency actually is.

The OneCoin team went back in history to the Stone Age days of bartering goods for goods and how money has changed throughout time. The message was that digital currency would bring a financial utopia, a digital future that would make flat currency obsolete. OneCoin was going to be the global leader, and the only one that mattered, the number one cryptocurrency. Then they played their ace.

They introduced Dr. Ruja Ignatova.

She appeared on a video presentation, which had a buzz about it, with repeated promotional talk of financial freedom. The film shown to prospective investors worldwide was so professional and the insistent message so convincing I felt some people would be kneeling in front of their laptops worshipping this lady and the message she was delivering. She came across as a deity.

For the moment they simply called her a money-world superstar. She had a PhD and used to work for the big-time financial company McKinsey & Company, which advises many Fortune 1,000 companies, institutions, and governments. They showed her on the cover of Forbes magazine and on glorious display on two pages inside. She was shown in Financial IT magazine making a speech at a European economic summit and explaining what she had achieved in founding OneCoin.

I was sitting in my rented council house and already hero-worshipping this Dr. Ruja and listening as Sally Losa told us the value of OneCoin. Then, more excitement as they explained that as soon as you bought a Tycoon pack- age for £5,000, the package would have a digital value of £48,000 based on OneCoin being valued at £5.25 at that mo- ment. At the same time, I was recruited into the OneCoin WhatsApp groups, where all the chat began about how you could really only change your family’s life with the Tycoon package and above. The sales team insisted that as soon as you even looked in the direction of one of the packages, you were a millionaire. It was a powerful pitch. 

“My God, I’m absolutely blown away.” 

I felt I was finally doing something positive with my dad’s money. 

Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen by Jennifer

McAdam with Douglas Thompson (Ad Lib Publishers) Out Now

Jen McAdam was a victim of the OneCoin global cryptocurrency fraud, which stole an estimated $27 billion from ordinary people around the world. The evil genius of the scam was its target, society's 'unbanked,' not wealthy investors, and it robbed millions of their livelihood and futures. The poor became poorer. The brutal plundering led by self-styled Cryptoqueen Ruja Ignatova defied all legal and banking barriers bamboozling financial authorities - until Jen McAdam fought back. With a GBP15,000 inheritance from her father, saved from a careful life in a west of Scotland mining town, Jen wanted to invest wisely for her family's future and was enraptured by the possibilities offered by OneCoin's promotional material and convincing endorsements from celebrities and financial institutions. They, like all Dr Ruja's flamboyant promises, were bogus. Jen McAdam was the first victim brave enough to fight back and despite death threats and an intimidating campaign to shut her down, and through a debilitating illness, strived tirelessly for justice - for herself, her family and friends, and the millions around the world who lost everything. She created and continues to lead victims 'support groups and in 2023, as the OneCoin bandits were being punished by international courts, spearheaded a move to get financial compensation for the many whose life hopes were cruelly crushed by the Cryptoqueen.

You can follow Jennifer McAdam on X @JenMcAdamUK 

Heather Critchlow on The Rise of the True Crime Podcast

©Photography by Helen Rosemier

Ever since the first series of US podcast Serial aired in 2014, millions have been fascinated by true crime podcasts and the dynamics behind them. That series, which ultimately led to an innocent man being released from jail, lit a spark and inspired countless others to follow.

These podcasts form a steady backdrop to my life. I take them walking, running and driving, cook and clean with them as the soundtrack. The voices trickle into my mind and the stories they tell stay there, haunting, terrifying, raging with injustice. 

The podcast has breathed new life into audio and the beauty of it is that it’s a democratic medium. There are media organisations making slick and well-funded series, but the barrier to entry is low and plenty start out as a couple of people with an iPhone. The sheer number of true crime podcasts out there means families of victims have a greater chance to be heard, with an audience invested in finding answers and fresh sets of eyes on the way their loved one’s case was handled.

My preferred type of true crime podcasts are those that dive into cold cases and attempt to find new evidence to solve these decades-old mysteries. To do this, podcasters travel to remote places, doorstep unlikely and uncommunicative people and lend a voice to those who have been forgotten by the wider world. The Teacher’s Pet, an Australian podcast about missing woman Lynette Dawson, led to a conviction, while US series Up and Vanished has help solve the mystery of what happened to missing teacher Tara Grinstead. It’s heartening that people who think they’ve got away with murder now have something else to fear.

Unlike TV documentary series, which are usually commissioned for a set number of episodes, true crime podcasts have been known to go on much longer than originally planned, with podcasters returning to review developments in ad hoc episodes. Some spend years working on the cases they investigate, often becoming far more drawn into a case than they expected when they set out. What drives them to do this and what is the impact on their own lives?

That is one of the questions at the heart of Unsolved, my debut novel about a true crime podcaster. In the first book, Cal Lovett travels to Aberdeenshire to investigate the cold case of a missing woman who rode her horse into the woods thirty-five years ago and never came out.

I’ve taken inspiration from the real world in creating him. David Ridgen, the Canadian journalist behind podcast Someone Knows Something is a master at delving into complicated cases that remain unsolved. Ridgen has a poetic style of narration and tenacity backed with kindness that I wanted my protagonist to emulate. He has also been known to take his son with him when investigating cases and in Unsolved Cal’s teenage daughter Chrissie accompanies him for a time.

And then imagination takes flight. Cal has particular reasons for seeking justice in cold cases – his own older sister vanished when he was nine years old and has never been found. Like those of us who listen to true crime podcasts, Cal desperately wants to know the truth. For him, it is deeply personal.

Time changes everything: people age and perspectives alter, allegiances shift and guilt seeps through relationships where someone knows something. As well as scientific advances moving things on, sometimes the simple truth is that people are now just ready to talk. 

When I started writing Unsolved, I was interested in this willingness to speak, the motivations behind people opening up years on from events and the possibility that even in the present day they have their own agenda, shame about their actions and secrets they want to hide. How do we know those opening up are telling the truth? These are themes I am keen to explore in the series.

Undoubtedly, the true crime podcast taps into our burning desire to know. It’s not only the podcaster that becomes entwined in the search for the truth – they take the audience with them, creating an unofficial workforce and network of investigators. The best of them give voices to the families of victims who have been forgotten by the wider world, shining a light on corruption or ineptitude. If we’re lucky, then they also deliver justice to those who have been waiting a very long time for it.

Unsolved by Heather Critchlow (Canelo Books) Out Now. 

He won't rest until he finds out the truth... Cal Lovett is obsessed with finding justice for the families of missing people. His true crime podcast is his way of helping others, even if he can't help himself. His sister, Margot, disappeared when he was a child. Only one man seems to know something. But he's behind bars and can't be trusted. So when the family of a missing Scottish woman begs for his help, he heads to Aberdeenshire in search of the truth. Does Cal have what it takes to unearth the secrets hiding in the hills? And what if he finds something that leads him back to the heart of his own family's past?

More information about Heather Critchlow and her writing can be found on her website. She tweets @h_critchlow and can also be found on Instagram @heather.critchlow

No Ordinary Day with Matt Johnson and John Murray.

 Author Matt Johnson in conversation with contributor John Murray to talk about how this book came about.

Matt Johnson

Matt: John, perhaps we should explain who we are first, about the campaign and how this all got started?

John: April 17th 1984, a day that will forever live in our memories. Yvonne and I were both uniform PCs at Bow Street. On that day, we were scheduled to do some routine work but were re-assigned to a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square. You were driving the local traffic car, as I now know.

Matt: That’s right, and although I’d never met you at that time, I knew Yvonne quite well. Not too long before, she’d been at my house warming party with Mick Liddle, her fiancé. Matt: John, perhaps we should explain who we are first, about the campaign and how this all got started?

John: April 17th 1984, a day that will forever live in our memories. Yvonne and I were both uniform PCs at Bow Street. On that day, we were scheduled to do some routine work but were re-assigned to a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square. You were driving the local traffic car, as I now know.

Matt: That’s right, and although I’d never met you at that time, I knew Yvonne quite well. Not too long before, she’d been at my house warming party with Mick Liddle, her fiancé. 

John Murray

John: Mick was on the demonstration as well, just a few yards from us. We were standing facing about fifty noisy demonstrators who were venting their anger against Colonel Gaddafi. I remember hearing a noise like fire crackers going off and then everything went silent, not a sound. Then, from the crowd somebody screamed.

Matt: When did you first realise Yvonne and many others had been shot?

John: It took a while; I mean who would ever have expected a man to open up on us with a Sterling machine gun from the first floor of the Embassy? Yvonne and I had changed position several times and it was only a moment earlier when she’d come across to me and offered to swap. The people in front of me were particularly vocal so she was doing me a favour. She was in my line of sight and I saw her go down. I thought she’d tripped over but it was only as she writhed in agony that I realised it was more serious than that. Our Sergeant, Howard Turner, helped me with her and it was then we saw the blood and her wound.

Matt: So, you knew then you’d been shot at and many people had been hit?

John: We all realised, if they opened up again we were sitting ducks. But there were injured people who needed help and, as we know, that sometimes means risking it all to do that. Together with another PC called Pete Rogers, we lifted Yvonne and carried her to Charles II Street where it was safer. And that’s where you came in. When the ambulance arrived, you were assigned to escort us to the Westminster Hospital.

Matt: Were you able to speak to Yvonne during those moments?

John: I was. She was hurting and I used a pair of scissors to cut the waistband of her skirt. There were two Libyan students with us who’d also been shot. One was really crying. Yvonne talked to him, calmed him down and reassured him. 

Matt: She realised she’d been shot?

John: By then, yes. And I promised her I would not rest until I’d helped he get the people who’d done it.

Matt: And an hour later came the awful news, that she had died?

John: Yes, and as we know, what followed was the longest siege in UK policing history. At the end of which our Government decided everyone inside, even those suspected of involvement in the murder, would be allowed to leave without being prosecuted.

Matt: Because they had diplomatic immunity?

John: They had nothing of the kind, as we now know. Some of those Libyans were killers, bombers, terrorists. They were in the UK to murder people.

Matt: And now the full story behind what happened that day is about to be told in this book. 

John: Yes, and if you don’t mind me saying, you’ve done an incredible job. This was a three dimensional jigsaw of information, some related, some apparently quite random. You’ve pieced it together with the skill of a detective.

Matt: Do you recall how the idea to write it came about?

John: The Victoria Derbyshire show had the idea to mark the anniversary of the murder with a reunion. They wanted to talk to me about what was a 36 year campaign at that time, and to bring me together with you, with Tony Long from the firearms team and with Clive Mabry, that legend amongst police officers.

Matt: Clive being the PC who sneaked into the Square late at night and under cover of darkness to recover Yvonne’s hat from the street outside the Libyan Embassy?

John: I’d never met him. We knew he existed but it was the BBC researcher who tracked him down. Ex-para. Brave as you can imagine. Rescued her hat so it could sit on her coffin for the funeral.

Matt: The coffin you personally carried into Salisbury Cathedral.

John: That’s right. I repeated my promise to her that day as well. I promised I would get the men that did it. 

Matt: Do you remember how the idea for a book came up that day?

John: I’ve read all your novels and loved them. And I remember you dedicated your very first novel to Yvonne’s memory. Clive suggested it as we talked about those books. He reckoned you could do it because you’d be able to get access to people that an ordinary writer couldn’t. And they’d talk you because of your pedigree. 

Matt: I remember I took a long time thinking about it. It was a lot of responsibility. I’d never written non-fiction before and I didn’t want to let you down, to let down Yvonne’s memory. Even once I’d started I had many doubts.

John: It was a mammoth task. We knew there was stuff in the National Archives waiting to be discovered and there was a story to be told but it grew to even more than I expected.

Matt: Amazing to think what the Government was up to in those days, supposedly in our best interests?

John: And what they’re almost certainly up to today.

Matt; So, what is your hope for the book?

John: I’m hoping people will read it and learn the truth. Over the years I’ve talked to more people than I could count who remember where they were and what they were doing on the day Yvonne was shot. This was a national tragedy not just a police tragedy. I want people to understand what drove me to do the best for my friend and to secure justice for her. I want them to know who killed Yvonne, how they did it and why. And I want them to know why our Government wanted the killers to go free. What about you, similar I’d guess?

Matt: Yes, all as you describe. But for me there’s more. I want people to learn about you and about how brave you’ve been, the personal risks you’ve taken and the dangers you’ve faced and, despite all that, you never gave up. And I want people to read how events that day shaped policing in the UK for the next forty years, and in ways they might hardly have believed. The truth, I think, will shock people but sadly, I fear it may not surprise them.

John Murray has fought for nearly 40 years to secure justice for the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. No Ordinary Day tells the story of that fight.

No Ordinary Day: Espionage, Betrayal, Terrorism and Corruption - The Truth Behind the Murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher by Matt Johnson with John Murray (Mardle Books) Out Now.

On 17 April 1984, as police and anti-Gaddafi demonstrators gathered in the street outside the Libyan People's Bureau in London, they had no way of knowing they were about to become part of one of the greatest tragedies in British policing history. At 10.17a.m. automatic gunfire rained down on them. WPC Yvonne Fletcher was hit in the back and later died from her injuries. Twelve demonstrators were wounded. The gunmen were Libyans, both concealed behind a first-floor window of the Bureau. Two weeks later, all those present inside the Bureau, including everyone suspected of involvement in the attack, were deported from the UK. Men guilty of terrorism and murder were neither arrested nor prosecuted. As Yvonne Fletcher lay dying, her colleague and close friend PC John Murray cradled her in his arms. Before she lost consciousness, he promised her he would not rest until those responsible for her murder had been brought to justice.

Thirty-seven years would pass before John was able to fulfil that promise. Whilst writing John Murray's story, Matt Johnson identified UK government duplicity, secret service deals and how a plan to finally defeat the all-powerful National Union of Mineworkers would place the government in an invidious position when pro- and anti-Gaddafi elements brought their fight to the streets of the UK. He was able to discover why, in 1984, her killers had been allowed to go free. His extensive research also revealed how events on 17 April resulted in a 30-year government campaign to bring the police services of the UK under political control, a campaign that has driven our police service into the state of disarray we see today. The story behind what happened outside the Libyan People's Bureau is complex, shocking and revealing. Matt Johnson's compelling account pulls together a series of seemingly unconnected threads into a coherent whole, incorporating all the inter-related elements of politics, business, secret service missions and chance. For some, this will be a very uncomfortable read. For many, it may confirm what they already suspect, that we, the public, know very little of the decisions being made by our elected representatives and the actions taken by official bodies, supposedly in our best interests.