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The books that changed me

May 23, 2025 /

Paul Kincaid wrote recently about his response to a review of his new (and excellent) essay collection Colourfields, and how that review had made him take a closer look at what constitutes ‘his’ science fiction, and what that might say about him both as a reader and as a writer.

It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac post, looking back at a forty-year stretch as a science fiction critic. It includes a lovely anecdote in which Paul approaches Chris at a convention – the first time they’d met – and asks him to sign his copy of Inverted World. Chris, apparently, brushed him off and told him to go and get the book signed by the illustrator instead. Given the thousands of copies of his books that Chris was more than happy to sign in the years following, I can confidently say to Paul that his reaction at that early stage of his career would have been entirely down to feeling overwhelmed and vaguely embarrassed that someone had actually read a novel of his and thought enough of it to initiate contact. Chris was just thirty when Inverted World was published, Paul Kincaid twenty-two. You see what I mean about elegiac.

The deeply considered, wide-ranging and thoughtful review of Colourfields Paul is addressing is by Roseanna Pendlebury, who clearly gained much in the reading and – more importantly – was prepared to engage with the book on its own terms even when those terms diverged from her particular interests. She then went on to write a follow-up essay in which she gave more personal insights into her own version of science fiction. It’s this kind of investigative, text-focused writing that has always characterised the best criticism within SF as well as beyond it, that has been a primary source of inspiration in my own critical practice. ‘My’ SF – both in the kind of writing I’m interested in and the frame through which I view it – is much closer to Kincaid’s than to Pendlebury’s, but it is nonetheless a source of gladness and relief to know that there are younger critics coming down the line with the talent, wit and rigour to continue with the job of building SF’s critical hinterland. (Yes, I am still using that phrase, and yes, said hinterland is still as important as it ever was.)

Though the books Kincaid and Pendlebury list and discuss as best examples of what constitutes their personal science fiction are markedly different and say equally different things about SF, one thing I noticed about both critics’ posts was that they each made reference to a book that precipitated a radical change in their understanding of science fiction, what it could do and how they related to it. For Pendlebury it was her reading of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, ‘the hinge upon which all this turns’, and which happened to coincide with ‘a shift in my own awareness of genre, where I began to genuinely pay attention.’ For Kincaid, it was his encounter with Keith Roberts’s Pavane, the novel that switched him on to science fiction as a mode of literature with an identity all its own.

Kincaid mentions also a period of childhood illness that necessitated him spending several weeks at home in bed, away from school and outside of his normal routines. It’s interesting, how many writers share this experience. Chris wrote more than once about a cycling accident at the age of fourteen, which left him with a concussion and a two-week ‘memory gap’. He often cited this sudden insecurity around the subject of memory as the germ of all his future fiction. Versions of the accident itself – or enforced periods of absence from school – crop up in several of his novels. In a recent interview on Radio 4, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell speaks eloquently of a serious childhood illness that led to her being hospitalised for several months, territory she has previously explored through her 2017 memoir I Am I Am I Am. Her premature awareness of the nearness of death, together with the physical separation from others of her peer group, completely altered her view of the world and pushed her to examine her thoughts and emotions through the medium of writing. When I was twelve, I unexpectedly developed pneumonia, and was away from school for most of the Easter term. I was already a compulsive reader, but this period of enforced isolation had a significant effect on me. My English teacher sent me a package of reading material that included Alan Garner’s The Owl Service as well as other books I might not have come across otherwise, or at least not then. This was also when I first started listening to Radio 3, hour after hour of ‘secret education’ that laid the groundwork for all my future interest in classical music.

There was something else about that time, though, something less immediately identifiable or tangible but profound in its effects. Time to think and time to be. Time to reflect and form opinions. Time to get to know oneself and one’s opinions as distinct from the crowd. I have heard others say similar things about a week at a writers’ retreat, a religious retreat or even just time away in a different location.

It is easy to become locked into patterns, into established ways of thinking, and most especially in the compilation of lists of significant books! I have made so many of these during my life as a writer. I enjoy creating them and I find them interesting – other people’s as much as my own. It’s no secret that I’m a lists kind of person. But in recent years especially an element of doubt has begun to creep in. Either my choices seem pre-ordained – books I have chosen before, and so gravitate immediately towards, as one might automatically assume the same position on a well-used mattress – or they reflect nothing so much as the most recent shift or enthusiasm in my current reading and writing. Not that this is uninteresting or without value, but looking at it from the inside it can be laughably predictable.

Which books have really, really changed me? I know that Chris’s A Dream of Wessex did. It was the first book of his I read, on a recommendation from a friend. This was in my middle twenties, and I had not yet started writing seriously for publication. I had not heard of Christopher Priest either, and before reading A Dream of Wessex I had no idea that this kind of science fiction was even possible. I wanted more of it – more especially of books by Christopher Priest. This was long before Amazon or Abebooks and getting hold of titles not currently in print was a much more difficult, some might say a more exciting challenge than it is today. It was mostly a matter of stumbling across them – in second hand bookshops, in the local library, both of which I made use of in my search for Chris’s backlist. Each new find was a source of delight and minor celebration. By the time Chris and I actually met, I had read everything of his with the exception of Indoctrinaire, which was impossible to find. In an echo of his earlier equivocation around signing Inverted World for the young Paul Kincaid, it was some time before I finally persuaded him to give me a copy.

(And of course I found it remarkable, his portrait of the artist as a young man.)

I had a similar experience reading Mike Harrison a number of years later. Signs of Life was the first book of his I read – it had not long come out – and I knew instantly that Mike would be an ‘auto-buy’ writer for me from now on. But it was his short fiction collection Travel Arrangements, published in 2000 and more or less at the exact time I first began sending my own stories to magazines, that opened up a new awareness of what one was allowed to do in fiction, if one had the gall to try. These strange, elliptical stories had no easily definable narrative – yet they immediately felt like a part of me, of what I understood to be the meaning and function of writing as a vocation. Their effect on my ability to read was similar to what had happened to me with Eliot’s The Waste Land, some fifteen years before.

There are three writers in particular whose whole oeuvre has cemented itself in my consciousness as indispensable to the way I see not so much the world at large but the business of being a writer who lives in that world. Iris Murdoch always wrote in the knowledge that ‘the mundane’ is a kind of myth, removed from the miraculous by the narrowest of margins. This, to me, has always seemed self-evident, and it is probably for this reason that Murdoch is a writer I can always drop everything else to read and then for however long I choose to linger in her world find it difficult to pay attention to anyone else. Vladimir Nabokov was a life-changer for me, the summation of my love affair with Russian literature but also my mentor and my guide. For Nabokov, writing was the thing, the only end, the life choice. Critics tend to get so wrapped up in his mastery of language that they often fail to mention how many of his novels are encoded autobiographies, the story of himself, told in different voices, the ultimate autofiction.

Chris and I discovered Roberto Bolano together and fell equally in love, which is its own set of memories, but Bolano for me – like Priest, like Harrison – opened a door into a new way of writing, and thinking about writing. His apparent looseness of style, his discursiveness – the polar opposite of VN – which is really a diversion, a unique construct through which Bolano approaches his subject matter, which is writing, writing, always writing. His repurposing of generic archetypes – the science fiction story and in particular the detective story, both of which he loved – to suit his own ends, which are invariably tied up in his obsession with form.

I always used to say to Chris, that if I were stuck on a desert island with only books by Murdoch, or Nabokov, or Bolano then they would definitely keep me going until I was rescued.

I have now been writing professionally for twenty years. My relationship with reading has changed, or rather, it has evolved, becoming both more urgent and less innocent. It is impossible simply to read; as a writer, one reads with the unspoken question: how is this done and what can I learn from it? And yet those high-wire moments of joy are no less forthcoming. I still think most days about Maria Gainza’s novel Optic Nerve, which I happened to turn to during a moment of acute foreboding. It showed me what could be done with fact inside fiction and through its discussions of art literally gave me back my sense of why I am on this planet. I think all the time about Emlyn Williams’s great, great true crime novel Beyond Belief, the darkest of subject matter set against the most brilliantly evoked urban landscape of lived reality, the ultimate masterclass in what this kind of writing should be and why it is necessary. Reading Gordon Burn’s Sex and Violence, Death and Silence and loving how he wrote about art as urgently and as brilliantly as he wrote about the subjects he is best known for. Seeing how such apparent contradictions are a continuum, how knowing this is important, especially to me. Understanding, every time I pick up a book by Helen Garner, that I will never come close to her naked and unflinching deployment of the pronoun ‘I’. Having to try and find my own way around that, but feeling through each moment of reading her an overwhelming and dizzy gratitude to be sharing space-time with this extraordinary writer.

Autobibliography by Rob Doyle: diary of a vocation

May 18, 2025 /

‘What is it we’re reading for? I mean, why do we keep reading and rereading a particular novelist? When I think about Bolano – and I think about him often – invariably I find my way to the conclusion that what I’m primarily in it for is friendship.’

‘I read The Dispossessed when I still suspected that my anarcho-punk friends might be right about everything. While the novel rammed home the ways in which capitalism mutilates us, life in the anarchist ‘utopia’ of Anarres – hard labour, dust and aggressively policed mediocrity – made me wonder if capitalism wasn’t the best of a bad lot.’

‘Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don’t need Heraclitus to remind me that you can’t step into the same river twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening – a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.’

‘PROBLEMATIC: A judgement generated by the demand that art avoid describing what is and express what ought to be, and that we admire only art that issues from a stainless soul and a clean rap sheet. Everything in the human being that is messy, vital and interesting; everything shadowy, unconscious, offline.’

‘London Fields failed to make the 1989 Booker Prize shortlist, cock-blocked by two feminist judges who disapproved of the depiction of women. Even if you feel they had a point, can we nonetheless agree that in its architectonic splendour, visions of megacity entropy and unrelenting lingual charisma London Fields stands damn near the summit of modern novelistic achievement?’

‘Ballard was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation?’

*

In 2019, Rob Doyle was commissioned to write a weekly books column for the Irish Times, a ‘year of rereading’ that would be a journey back through the novels that had meant the most to him. There were two rules: books chosen were to have been published no later than the year 2000 and each column would run to a maximum of 340 words. Within three months of the final column being published, the COVID lockdowns began. With previous plans put on hold, Doyle found himself reflecting on the wider implications of his fifty-two book columns. What had his choices said about him, both as reader and writer? And what did such choices mean, precisely now?

It would be wrong to call Autobibliography a diary of the pandemic, though it sort of is, just as it is also a partial memoir of Doyle’s progress to date. What it is mostly though is a declaration of allegiance to the practice of art, an impassioned defence of a particular kind of writing – ‘the kind of novel with as much essay in it as narrative, the kind you can read with a pen in your hand’ – and why such writing matters.

Doyle loves Houellebecq, Cioran, Nietzsche, Dyer, Mailer, Didion (sort of), Carrere, Bolano, Lispector, Sarraute, Markson. His choices are eclectic, but with a certain unity. The commentary on the books themselves – like Doyle’s always brilliant reviews – rise far above the practised, easy argument it is so easy to fall into when you’ve a limited word count. The passages of memoir and reflection woven between offer a commentary upon that commentary, an autobibliography, a portrait of a writer in fifty-two books.

It’s also very funny. If you enjoyed Mike Harrison’s Wish I Was Here then you will probably love this book, too. That I am in sympathy with Doyle on most of what he says here is beside the point. Thank goodness there are writers writing who write like this, writers who understand what the gig’s about, who have the courage and talent to put that knowledge to practice, who are still young.

The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan

May 4, 2025 /

I have been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s work for more than twenty years. In a strange and roundabout way, it is partly because of O’Hagan that Chris and I came to live in Scotland. I first visited the Isle of Bute after having recently read O’Hagan’s debut novel Personality, which follows the life of a young woman from a Scottish-Italian family with a talent for singing that overturns her life as much as it defines it. The precocious young singer in Personality is based on Lena Zavaroni, who was born and brought up in Rothesay. I fell in love with O’Hagan’s book, which is as much about the Scottish-Italian experience in general as about the unforgiving and often exploitative nature of the entertainment industry, and, when I happened to be visiting Glasgow in the late spring of 2003 I was determined to make the trip to Bute as well. There is a photo of me on the ferry, sailing into Rothesay harbour – this was before the new ferry terminal was opened in the late 2000s and we still had the smaller, ‘streaker’ ferries. I remember sitting eating an ice cream in Zavaroni’s ice cream parlour on the esplanade and feeling as if I had made some sort of pilgrimage. I never forgot my trip to Bute, and when I told Chris about the island, its milder climate and unique atmosphere, there was clearly something in what I said that caught at his imagination.

Chris was never particularly interested in Lena Zavaroni, but he greatly admired O’Hagan’s 2017 book The Secret Life, in which O’Hagan explores through three extended essays themes of identity, conspiracy, and secrecy within the context of the digital revolution. These essays – the most famous of which tells the story of what happened when O’Hagan was hired to ghost-write the autobiography of Julian Assange – are superb, risk-taking, compulsive reading, and one of the things I have come to admire most about O’Hagan is his equal facility with fiction and non-fiction. I revisited his first book, The Missing this week, and found it still more powerful and more original than I did the first time I read it a decade ago, firstly I think because I am now living so much nearer to Glasgow, where a good chunk of the book’s focus lies, and secondly because the themes it interrogates are in such close alignment with my own literary interests.

The Missing begins in the east end of Glasgow, where O’Hagan was born, and with the sudden loss of his grandfather Michael, whose ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the second world war. His wife Molly receives a telegram telling her that Michael is missing in action, believed drowned. But there is no proof, no body, no certainty. ‘He was missing,’ the young O’Hagan learns. ‘I’d never seen him, and I was born twenty-eight years after he disappeared at sea. … My granda Michael looked like Glasgow: a place that felt far away by then, that sounded old and big and always in the dark.’

Growing up on one of the new housing estates in the coastal town of Irvine, O’Hagan always felt that he ‘couldn’t get over’ his grandfather’s missing-ness, a state that both defined him and erased him. As a lad, O’Hagan ran wild with the other kids on the estate, participating in the kind of rough play and minor acts of vandalism that can sometimes tip over the edge into something darker. When a toddler goes missing on the estate, that harsh duality is further underlined. O’Hagan eventually grows away from his beginnings, discovering new possibilities and freedoms through the world of books. But it is not too great a leap to imagine that it is these early experiences of someone being missing that lie behind his continuing preoccupation with the subject as a writer. The landscape of trauma and unanswered questions. The different ways in which a person can go missing, or fall into the kind of social invisibility that ceases to be a choice and becomes a prelude to tragedy.

O’Hagan recounts his visits to homeless shelters, his interviews with those who take refuge there – some of them listed as missing who do not want to be found – and with the staff at the National Missing Persons Helpline who work tirelessly to establish links between those who are searching and those who are lost. Mary, who is one of its founders, ‘always looks busy, almost too busy to stop.’ O’Hagan describes Mary’s pragmatic attitude: she is not overly concerned with why people go missing, with what their missing-ness might mean on an existential level. She is interested in practical solutions, to finding people and – if possible – helping them back on to a more secure footing. O’Hagan admires her strength of purpose and practical approach, whilst freely admitting that for him, this is only half of the story. That story, in fact, is what obsesses him, what keeps him coming back. ‘Kids had been snatched off the street, while other kids played around them, and adults went on their way. Those who notice the missing will say, now and then, that nothing could ever be the same again. And neither it could, not for anyone. We must accept that we can be changed by things we don’t understand.’

The Missing concludes with O’Hagan’s recollections of the West case, with the incredible scenes he witnessed in 1994 as police began excavating the gardens and cellar of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, with neighbours of the Wests charging journalists hundreds of pounds to rent rooms with a view of the garden, ‘£1 to use the toilet, £3 for a bacon sandwich.’ The atmosphere around these events is as thick with horror and disbelief as ever, yet even at the time, O’Hagan becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fact that for all their understandable fascination with the case, most journalists were far more interested in ‘what happened’ than in who it happened to. For the most part, the women who had been killed by the Wests remained faceless, ‘victims’ rather than people. O’Hagan does everything he can to remedy this, teasing out information about the women’s stories and personal backgrounds. His account of the years Fred West spent living in Glasgow, where he made a living driving an ice cream van, takes on a quality of the uncanny that is scarcely bearable: it turns out that West began his career of abuse just down the road from where O’Hagan was born.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in this long chapter comes when O’Hagan interviews Liz Brewer, one of the many transitory young women who spent part of their youth living in the West household and whose best friend at the time, Shirley Anne Robinson, was one of the nine whose remains were discovered at 25 Cromwell Street. For Liz and the other women like her, the West household was chaotic and often unstable but was perceived by them at the time as safer than the places they had escaped from. ‘You know something,’ Liz said, ‘I would say that some of my years in Cromwell Street were among the happiest of my life. The stuff that’s come out has wasted those years. People have said, “How could you live there?” but you know, if you were someone who’d been on the road, someone who was a bit lost, it could be like a security. Many of us wanted to belong to this, an extended family.’

No words could better convey the contradictions and cruel complexities of a situation that had as much to do with the failings of wider society as with the Wests themselves. Liz Brewer’s words are impossible to forget, all the more so because the lesson that is in them has still to be learned.

We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper (2020)

April 25, 2025 /

While she was still a student at Harvard, Becky Cooper was told about a 1969 postgraduate student of archaeology, Jane Britton, who was found murdered in her apartment after failing to present herself for her General examinations. Traces of red ochre found at the scene seemed to suggest that Jane’s killer might have an association with the Archaeology department itself, that in all probability she had known her attacker.

Jane’s story was told to Cooper almost as a warning – that Harvard was not always a safe place to be, especially for women. Jane had been a singular individual, someone who made an impression on everyone who came into contact with her. There had been people in her life who thought she sailed too close to the wind. Others who nurtured unspoken jealousies. Jane’s murder was shocking, but more shocking still was the silence that seemed to descend in the wake of it. Friends stopped talking about her. Her family were too distraught and divided amongst themselves to discuss what had happened. Following the initial inquiry, the police had drawn a blank. Though there were whispers and rumours among the students who had known Jane and studied with her, no one was ever charged with her murder. The police refused to divulge Jane’s records, even though no work had been done on the case, seemingly, for decades.

The more Cooper’s questions multiplied, the deeper her obsession with the case became. She felt a personal connection to Jane that was hard to define but that would not let go of her. Determined to unravel the web of clues, false leads and tenuous connections that had confounded the police, she sets out on a journey to discover what she can. Ten years later, and just at the point where it seems the truth of Jane’s life and death might never be known, new evidence comes to light that throws all previous assumptions into confusion.

We Keep the Dead Close is a book in which the personal and the political are in perfect alignment. Cooper never loses sight of the story – what really happened? – but she is thorough and unstinting too in her pursuit of wider questions: how are women treated by the academic world? How far must women comply with the norms society expects of them in order to stay ‘safe’? What can we ever really know about another person, especially a person who is no longer around to speak for themselves?

Cooper’s writing is tactile, evocative and powerful in its arguments, above all because Cooper takes the risk of allowing herself to become a part of the story. Anyone who doubts the importance and social relevance of true crime writing might begin their reading here.

The Bureau by Eoin McNamee

April 16, 2025 /

Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.

‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.

The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.

The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.

But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.

They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.

The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.

You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.

It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.

The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.

Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.

Butcher’s Dozen: Thirteen Novels Inspired by True Crime Events

April 9, 2025 /

Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history – remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too, and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action, frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’

The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.

There is some marvellous true crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations, that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism. Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose lives are missing from the historical record.

True crime novelists, like historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.

Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy. Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated, unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.   

A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands, this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy. Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint, empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.  

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the history books.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first awakened my interest in writing based around true events.

Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened – whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our job.’ He gets my vote every time.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843, Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.

Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them, most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of poverty that few writers have matched. 

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn (2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 – and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times now and am still hypnotized by it.

The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure – four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative – The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting, thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own time. 

Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie McDermott (2020). Roberto Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach, blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.

The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully appreciate its inventiveness.   

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable – but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised, with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove – glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing awareness of the danger Hannah is in.

Why Do We Keep Doing This? The Queens of True Crime

April 2, 2025 /

I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium, beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.

Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.

Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.

I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self  – are nailed into place.

A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.

The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.

There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.

 As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.

This House of Grief had a powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure – and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient, manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is being described.

Exploitative true crime is not so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of the society we live in.

On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.

Certain extreme fringes of the fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’ backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much, actually, who the Ripper was.

They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.

Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’

I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’

I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.

There are many theories as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind. We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.

I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.  

In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?

Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?

In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’

Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.

FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)

‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal understanding of what is at stake.

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)

Nelson’s aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.

The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee (2015)

Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis. The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)

As well as being the most problematic, serial killers are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016 with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just two months after the book’s publication.   

Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza (2023)

Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested. Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism, the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first to admire the book that bears her name.

Reading Peace, Writing Granite

March 25, 2025 /

It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.

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READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE

‘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 1958, 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 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.

At Candlemas: Winter Night (1948) by Boris Pasternak

February 2, 2025 /

Мело, мело по всей земле
Во все пределы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

Как летом роем мошкара
Летит на пламя,
Слетались хлопья со двора
К оконной раме.

Метель лепила на стекле
Кружки и стрелы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На озаренный потолок
Ложились тени,
Скрещенья рук, скрещенья ног,
Судьбы скрещенья.

И падали два башмачка
Со стуком на пол.
И воск слезами с ночника
На платье капал.

И все терялось в снежной мгле
Седой и белой.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На свечку дуло из угла,
И жар соблазна
Вздымал, как ангел, два крыла
Крестообразно.

Мело весь месяц в феврале,
И то и дело
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

*

{Snow fell and fell across the world fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned as midges in summer swarm to the flame so the snowflakes swarmed to the doorstep and to the window frame the blizzard scratched upon the pane circles and spears a candle burned on the table a candle burned upon the lighted ceiling the shadows locked crossed arms crossed feet crossed fate as two shoes fell to the floor from the bed so the tears of wax from the candle dripped on the cast-off dress and all was lost in the greyish gloom a candle burned on the table a candle burned and when the flame flickered in the icy draught love’s heat raised it up again wings crossed like an angel’s all through the month of February the snow fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned.)

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