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.

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.