The miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985 was one of the defining events of twentieth-century British life. Statistics barely capture what it did to communities: 9,808 arrests, over 10,000 charges, three murder charges, and a fracture in the solidarity of the mining communities that never fully healed. Families fell out. Friends became enemies. Men who had trusted each other with their lives underground found themselves on opposite sides of a line that nobody had drawn.

Kerry Costello’s The Long Game takes this history seriously — not as political statement, but as the soil in which murder grows.

The Strike as Motive

At the centre of The Long Game is a group of men who grew up together in Regent Park West, Pendlebury — a gang of five, as they called themselves in childhood, who became miners and remained friends into adulthood. The strike tested that friendship to destruction. And someone, somewhere, has been avenging the consequences ever since.

Detective Sergeant Gibson, investigating what appears at first to be a natural death in 1990, gradually uncovers a pattern of killings that reaches back through the strike and further still. The murders are quiet, methodical, made to look like accidents or natural causes. The killer has been playing the long game — and they are very nearly finished.

A World That Feels True

What gives The Long Game its particular weight is that the miners’ strike is not used as dramatic backdrop. It is used as dramatic cause. The novel understands what the strike actually did to communities like Swinton and Pendlebury: the friendships destroyed, the loyalties tested, the resentments that formed and calcified. One miner killed by another. A conviction many believe to have been wrong. And the question that hangs over everything: if he didn’t do it, who did?

For readers who lived through that period, or who know its history, the novel will carry an additional resonance. For those who don’t, it is an extraordinarily vivid account of what it felt like to live through one of the most divisive episodes in modern British history — told through the intimate lens of a single community.

History as Crime Fiction

The best historical crime fiction doesn’t use its period as decoration. It uses it to show how the crimes could only have happened in that time, in that place, to those people. The Long Game is historical crime fiction of that kind. The murders are inseparable from the strike, from the colliery accident of 1958, from the bombing raids of 1942.

This is crime fiction for readers who want to understand the world the crimes happened in, not just find out who committed them.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.