|
MRJ feature
CRIME COMES TO CROWBY
I’d done my share of foreign travel. I’d done my share of re-location from major city to major city in pursuit of career – and other – opportunities. So it was as much a matter of timing as anything else that I was living in a relatively small English town when I started writing the first Inspector Jacobson book. It just felt natural and obvious to me to include the sights and sounds of my daily life as the backdrop to the story I was trying to create (write what you know might be a writing class cliché but that doesn’t mean that it’s not good advice for a new writer). And so the fictional town of Crowby came into being. Medium sized, not too far from Birmingham, pretty much in the geographical centre of the nation. Middle England essentially – both geographically and conceptually.
England isn’t a big country of course. Nor is Great Britain as a whole. You could fit all four of its constituent parts – England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – into Texas nearly three times over and still have room to spare. Or you could cut and paste them into California and only overwrite slightly more than half the state. You can drive the entire length of England and Scotland in a day if you really push it. So basing Inspector Jacobson in Crowby has never felt limiting. If I want to use another location for a particular aspect of a particular story I can do so easily enough without un-suspending anybody’s disbelief. Jacobson’s cases regularly involve London and Birmingham – with walk-on roles for Manchester, Bristol, Brighton, the Lake District. And because they’re set in the globally connected world of now – post-internet, post mass air travel – the UK itself is no border. That first book took its readers to Amsterdam and, in the subsequent six books, the Crowby universe has extended itself where necessary to Barcelona, Zurich, even to Big Sur and Santa Monica.
But Crowby remains the epicentre. An amalgam of several real Midlands towns re-assembled in my imagination and making maximum use of the area’s iconic landscapes: canals, woodlands, abandoned industrial sites, converted grain stores, cramped red brick terraces and the contrasting leafy suburbs of the wealthy. Contrasting lives too – although modern crime pays scant attention to old-style socio-economic distinctions, increasingly assimilates itself across all social layers. The country house / millionaire’s mansion intersecting with the 'sink' estate and the middle-class enclave has become a recurrent theme in the Inspector Jacobson books. That’s probably also the reason I wanted to write police-based crime fiction in the first place. A police officer can realistically go anywhere, access any level of society, in the course of an investigation. In Britain, at least, no other occupation comes pre-loaded with that immediate, inbuilt advantage, making a fictional police inquiry an ideal instrument to cut through and explore some of the denser complexities of life in the twenty-first century.
So Jacobson and his close-knit team – DS Kerr, Emma Smith, Mick Hume – have stayed put all these years, dealing with Crowby’s worst cases. Familicides. Kidnappings. Racist murders. Drug syndicate killings. All the bad stuff that happens in modern Britain turns up on their doorstep exactly as it does for big-city coppers in London or Belfast or Glasgow. It may do so less frequently – but it does so often enough to give Jacobson, like his real-life counterparts, half-a-dozen truly serious cases to deal with every year: in fact, the most recent official national crime survey revealed that, in 2015, the most murderous place in the UK wasn’t any of its big cities but the sleepy, Lincolnshire town of Boston. All of that might have been in my mind when, for the most recent book, The Evil Thereof, I finally relented and gave Jacobson and his team a serial killer to play with. He’d been on the force thirty years, he was thinking about retirement, he’d never encountered one before – they were odds that, as a realist writer, I felt I could live with.
Yet a crime novel that anyone would actually want to read can’t just be concerned with ‘the facts’. Or at least I don’t think so. Realism is fine and necessary but it isn’t sufficient. There’s another simultaneous level on which you’re also creating fables, contemporary fairy stories. The knight battles with the dragon, Inspector Jacobson uncovers the truth. The same resolution, the same symbolic victory over adversity – even though we know that in the ‘real’ real world, evil often triumphs and the truth often gets missed or hidden. That, for me, in the end, remains the point of Frank Jacobson. Overweight, unfit, rude and gloomy he may be. But he’s still a hero, still an inspiration: whether a small-town one or otherwise. One commentator called him a Stoic which I quite liked as a description. Over and over, a good man does what he can … what else can he do?
© Iain McDowall, 2017. All rights reserved.
This feature first appeared in Mystery Readers Journal, Volume 32, No. 4 (Small Town Cops II)
|
|