Picnic Books

 A couple of weeks ago I was asked an interesting question in the Big Bull’s Head (pub) in Digbeth, South Birmingham.  Someone asked me why, in writing a novel about the miners’ strike, I’d written it as a crime thriller rather than a straightforward account of the strike?  Why had I made the protagonist a cop rather than a striking miner?  The novel that this guy (Tommy) was referring to was ENEMY WITHIN, my crime thriller retrospective that was short listed for the Dundee Book Prize in 2004. After several rewrites this is now being published by Picnic Publishing and accounts for my appearance on this blog site.  But Tommy’s question is valid enough to merit a more worthwhile answer than I gave him over a pint of Brew XI two weeks ago.  So, hope you’re reading this Tommy.

I’ve always been a big fan of what is sometimes called kitchen sink drama because I think it places concerns with themes such as alienation, centre stage in British literature and film.  There was always so much more to the films of Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson than that they were about the working class.  Rather, they represented the alienation and deepening social crisis of a working class community in decline.  These are themes I revisit in Enemy Within.  But I also truly believe the themes of kitchen sink realism worked best when they were synthesised with other genres (and particularly crime) that imposed an Aristotelian structure on these stories. Hence, the best kitchen sink film in British history is actually GET CARTER, based on the crime novel by Ted Lewis, that can be essentially seen as the alter ego to the novels of Alan Sillitoe. 

After GET CARTER, British film and TV experienced its golden age under the same conditions of open class warfare that gave us punk rock.  This all revolved around the fusion of underworld crime fiction with kitchen sink and can be seen in TV series such as THE SWEENEY and XYY MAN, as well as in the novels of GF Newman and Kenneth Royce.  These are all major influences on the way I write.  Sadly the miners (and wider working class) were defeated in the miners’ strike and this epoch changing event gave us the Thatcherite nightmare that we live under today.  It also changed the nature of the British state form from post war social democracy to conditions of the coercive state.  The importance of the retrospective crime drama as street history is that it can map these events and show how the present social crisis (typfied by rising crime) is based on the historical defeat of the working class. There was also another important reason for making my protagonist a cop – albeit one from a mining family whose brother was a WRP activist.  Most young people today have no lived experience of the class struggle and can only view it as outsiders.  Terry, the cop in my novel, is also an outsider who views the strike and its consequences as an outsider, while he tries to hunt down the brutal killer of a number of young girls.  This is an example of Brechtian distancing which, I think, works well in the book.

I’m impressed my stuff is already being compared to that of David Peace who was a contemporary of mine at Manchester Polytechnic.  It’s funny that Jake Arnott, David Peace and myself are all the same age.  But I’dlike to think there are differences in my work.  For example, in his Red Riding Quartet, Peace maps the approach of Thatcherism through the sinister appearance of the Reverand Dawes.  He’s like a prophet of the coming Thatcherite nightmare.  In my novel, the prophet of advancing Thatcherism is the killer himself – the Pimpernel who sees himself as a latter day Jack the Ripper giving birth to the 21st Century.  I also deal with parapoloitical concerns and the involvement of the secret state in the miners’ strike to a greater extent than either Arnott or Peace.  Finally, I take the reader to the heart of the corruption of the left itself, particularly of the WRP, to show how this contributed to a tragic and historical defeat.  In this I am indeed informed by the fact that I was a WRP activist and central committee member in the 1980s.  And it was for this reason that I wanted to make my protagonist a cop.    

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 1:57 am and is filed under Enemy Within by Roger Cottrell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.