Back to top

Crime and the city

Cover of Historical Mysteries
A review of Historical Mysteries by Chris Nickson

Chris Nickson really, really loves his hometown of Leeds, England. The music journalist and mystery novelist has written, by this point, four detective series spanning two hundred years set in Yorkshire’s largest city. While each series could loosely be considered police procedurals, what makes Nickson’s series stand out is the portrait of the city itself—a place largely off the beaten path for many crime readers—as it progresses from a regional center of the wool and agricultural trade to sprawling industrial boom town bursting with late Victorian optimism. They’re a unique option to read the life of a city through one of its native sons, through the imagined stories of its crimes.

The Broken Token, Richard Nottingham series opener, sees 1731 Leeds is still tied indelibly to the wool trade of the medieval age. It is, in fact, run by the wool merchants who have appointed Nottingham as town constable and charged him with keeping law and order in the town. Nottingham, knows that this means serving the interests of the wool merchants, whether or not that squares with justice. His background gives him harsh experience with this reality—as the unacknowledged son of one of these merchant princes, he’s know both the sumptuous wealth of Leeds’s upper class and the grinding, deathly poverty of the majority of the city’s denizens. As constable, he might have a salary and grudging access to the elite, but he and his family regularly face the reality of too little to eat. Such is the case when Nottingham is awakened to the news of a murder close to home: a dear family friend is found dead in the street, entangled with the body of a controversial dissenting preacher. Soon, another couple is discovered dead in an equally compromised position. To unravel the case, Nottingham can only rely on who he knows in the lowest stations of society, the pimps and procurers, who wield a greater amount of power than the wealthy care to realize. This is not the Georgian England of costume dramas or the classic novels. Nickson fully captures the gritty reality of hardscrabble life in the provinces at a time when life is still much as it was centuries earlier.

Fast forward 150 years, and the only thing that Nottingham would recognize of Leeds is the hordes of people struggling to make a living. In Gods of Gold, this is the world of Tom Harper, detective inspector of the Leeds Constabulary. The wool industry has been replaced by heavy industry and the population has grown in both numbers and diversity, but the tacit understanding of law to support the economy remains in place. Harper is notified of a missing eight-year-old girl, but when her father is caught in a lie and Harper discovers other girls have disappeared in the area, it becomes clear that someone powerful wants to keep the truth hidden. Like Nottingham over a century earlier, Harper’s idea of justice sometimes runs counter to what the powers-that-be would have. Unlike Nottingham, Harper senses a change is in the air—not least in his own home, as further books in the series attest.

Nickson is not a literary stylist, and his books rarely top 200 pages, but he has a gift for sketching in enough detail of character and setting to create a compelling world for his plots. The stories move quickly, in true police procedural fashion. Fans of mysteries with a strong sense of place might be want to try Nickson’s series as would those who like fast paced, tightly constructed police procedurals.  

Nov 7, 2024