Most British crime fiction finds its settings in familiar territory: the English village, the cathedral city, the Edinburgh backstreet, the London borough. There is nothing wrong with any of these — the best writers have drawn extraordinary fiction from all of them. But there is a world that crime fiction has largely ignored, and it happens to be one of the most dramatically fertile settings imaginable.

The industrial North West of England in the second half of the twentieth century — the mining towns of Swinton and Pendlebury, the terraced streets of Regent Park West, the communities built around Agecroft Colliery — is the setting for Kerry Costello’s The Long Game. And it turns out to be a perfect crime fiction setting.

Why Mining Communities Work

The elements that make for great crime fiction are all here. Close-knit communities where everybody knows everybody else’s business, which means secrets that should be impossible to keep are kept for decades. Men who have spent their working lives in conditions of genuine danger, which creates bonds as strong as any in human experience — and betrayals that cut correspondingly deep. Hard economic lives that create grievances capable of lasting a lifetime. And a particular culture of solidarity and silence that makes the work of a detective both more complicated and more rewarding.

Add to this the specific history of the period — the Second World War, the pit accidents of the 1950s, the devastating miners’ strike of 1984 — and you have a world in which the past is never truly past. Scores are never entirely settled. And a killer with a very long memory can operate with extraordinary patience.

The World of The Long Game

Kerry Costello grew up knowing this world, and it shows on every page. The detail in The Long Game is not the detail of research; it is the detail of experience. The way men talked to each other down the mine, the social rituals of the terraced street, the whippet races on Sunday afternoons, the particular texture of working-class life in the North West across five decades — all of it has the ring of lived truth.

For readers who find that the best crime fiction is inseparable from its location, The Long Game offers something that the usual settings simply cannot: a world that most readers will not already know, rendered with the kind of specificity that makes it feel utterly real.

History as the Engine of Crime

The murders in The Long Game are not motivated by anything contemporary. They reach back through the miners’ strike, through a colliery accident in the 1950s, all the way to the Second World War. The killer has been waiting decades. The setting is not merely backdrop — it is the reason everything happens. Without this specific world, this specific history, these specific people, there would be no crimes to solve.

That is what the best crime fiction does: it makes the setting inevitable.

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

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