To Hull and back: David returns with a new thriller
Crime writer David Young will be back on Tyneside this month on the publication day of new thriller Death in Blitz City. He spoke to DAVID WHETSTONE about his late-flowering fiction career
DAVID Young was a popular speaker at Newcastle Noir a few years ago, talking about his successful ‘Stasi’ series of crime thrillers set in the former East Germany.
Now he’s due back at the Lit & Phil to introduce his intriguing new novel and offer insights into a writer’s life of crime.
The fact he’s talking to me on the phone from the Greek island where he spends part of each year suggests this is not a life to be sniffed at.
“Sunny every day here,” he says happily, though adds that family ties mean he’s more often in London.
David has enjoyed enviable success. If seeing your name on a published novel is the dream of many, a series is usually beyond the wildest of them. But he insists he’s been lucky. Only by chance did he spot the crime writing course at a London university and then he was late applying.
He didn’t even know students were automatically entered into a competition and certainly didn’t expect to win.
He did win, though, with the manuscript that would become Stasi Child, set in the old German Democratic Republic in the 1970s and introducing detective Karin Müller of the Volkspolizei (national police force).
The book took off after being acquired by Bonnier Zaffre, imprint of an ambitious Swedish publishing house keen to establish a British fiction arm.
“They wanted to give their new company a big push along with their new books, so I was lucky that the first book got double publicity,” says David.
It succeeded on merit, though, earning great reviews and a coveted Crime Writers’ Association dagger.
Readers warmed to Müller and her clashes with the Stasi, East Germany’s secretive and repressive Ministry for State Security. After Stasi Child came Stasi Wolf and four more.
David, modest and matter of fact, says: “The last one came out a couple of years ago. It was fun and I could have carried on, but the publishers decided six was enough.
“You experience a sense of grief because you’ve lived with these
characters and you realise that’s it, although I hedged my bets in the last book with an ending that’s slightly ambiguous.”
To soften the blow, David managed to sell his publishers the idea for the new novel that brings him to Newcastle on publication day.
Childhood stories of Hull being heavily bombed in the war fed into Death in Blitz City, as did the fact that the extent of it was hushed up for security reasons, with the city invariably identified only as a North East town.
David accepts that many in and around Newcastle would dispute this designation.
The author, who is 64, was born in nearby Cottingham so his antennae twitched when he saw reference to it on a website during some internet surfing.
“It was a surprise to me that there had been this port battalion of black GIs with white officers stationed in my home village.
“I knew something of the racism that was in effect imported because it was covered in Foyle’s War (the ITV series, of which David was a fan).
“But when I looked into it, I was surprised at the extent of the segregation imposed.
“I’d say, in general, the black GIs were welcomed by locals, but to the extent that the commanding officer warned off one family who he felt was being too friendly.
“It seems some sovereignty over crime was given to the Americans. They were even loaned a prison in Shepton Mallett (Somerset) which was basically used as an execution centre. That’s not well known.”
In David’s novel, sadistic killings in this devastated city cause Inspector Ambrose Swift of the Metropolitan Police to be sent north.
You might guess that this individual is not some bland automaton with no distinguishing features.
Explains David: “He’s a former cavalry officer who lost his arm in the First World War and is, I guess, from an aristocratic, well-to-do background.
“Arriving in Hull, he can’t believe the devastation. There he meets his sidekick, Jim ‘Little’ Weighton, a part-time bare-knuckle boxer.”
Swift, for added interest, rides a white horse.
David says he was tempted to have him riding it round Hull city centre but more plausibly has it stabled in Beverley.
Also in the investigating team is auxiliary police constable Kathleen Carver, brought up in a farming family in Baldersdale, not far over North Pennine terrain from Barnard Castle.
Many people meeting a published author hope for a formula for success.
David would tell them there’s no such thing. But he recommends a good creative writing course to instil discipline and possibly lead to meetings with agents.
He signed up for his MA course after sensing his time as a news editor at BBC World News was almost done. After 27 years at the Corporation, he was “thoroughly fed up” and felt it might be mutual.
But what you might also take from David’s subsequent fiction career is the importance of being alert to things that can colour a good tale.
He recalls the band he set up in 2008 when still at the BBC and needing “a little let-off-steam project”.
“It wasn’t really a band. I went in with a producer and we did an album and then I got some musicians together and managed to blag a tour of places that had been in East Germany.
“Things are weird, aren’t they? That’s what gave me the idea for Stasi Child. The band (The Candy Twins) didn’t last long. I was a singer-songwriter who couldn’t sing and wouldn’t let anyone else sing.”
Then there’s the startling memory from a teenage trek along the Pennine Way which contributed in a small way to the new novel.
He and his mates, stuck for a place to stay, saw a woman scrubbing clothes on a rock by a stream. Obligingly, she let them sleep up top in her barn. David recalls being overcome by the need to relieve himself in the pitch black of the night.
“I didn’t trust myself going down the ladder in the dark so thought if I went in the corner the straw would absorb it.”
From below came a shriek. Their host, who they later learned was Hannah Hauxwell, hill farmer and subsequent unlikely TV personality, was up before dawn to milk the cows down below. That was my link to Baldersdale. It’s the way it happens – you take little things from real life.”
You’d hope this wasn’t an equally vivid memory for Hannah Hauxwell, who died in 2018, aged 91.
Flashes of inspiration, ‘sliding doors’ moments, overheard snatches of dialogue and the hard graft that nobody really wants to hear about. All are part of the fiction writing mix, says David.
He’ll be at the Lit & Phil to elaborate at 7pm on July 7, the day Death in Blitz City is published. Tickets are free but must be booked at www. litandphil.co.uk