David Young, congratulations on your new novel, Death in Blitz City. This is a bit of a departure for you being your first set during the Second World War, not the Cold War. Why the shift in focus?
I think the Karin Müller ‘Stasi Child’ series had a good run, and I was delighted that we managed to maintain interest and quality over the six books. But my editor felt it was time for something new, and Death in Blitz City was the idea that he liked the best. There are, in any case, a lot of parallels. The Cold War was essentially a child of the Second World War, as was East Germany itself. And in the Stasi Child series I’d explored some WW2 themes and how they impacted on the communist side of Germany, particularly in Stasi 77, the fourth in the series – where the whole mystery is rooted in the war. So it was a natural progression.
We’re in Hull, Yorkshire, 1942 during the Hull Blitz. You’re from the area – had you always wanted to write about the city and its bombings?
Not necessarily, but as a child growing up on the outskirts of Hull, I was often told how bad the bombing of Hull had been – yet it was kept secret to a large extent, with newspaper reports often only permitted to call it an anonymous ‘North-East Coastal Town’ or similar. And I suppose growing up in the sixties, we didn’t really realise how recent the war was. To us as children it was ancient history – yet we played in old bomb shelters, and the evidence of the bombings was still at that time very visible in Hull. Gaps in facades, rows and rows of prefab housing, that sort of thing.
Hull had been a target for the Germans even in WW1, but suffered more terribly from 1940. How bad was the Hull Blitz?
It’s generally held to have been the most heavily bombed city outside of London. The trouble was the Humber Estuary was an easy visual guide for the German bombers, and although Hull was a target itself, it was also en route to bombing other industrial cities, such as Sheffield. So if the weather was too bad for the Luftwaffe to accurately attack another city, for example, they would dump their bombs on Hull. Nearly half its pre-war population of more than 300,000 were made homeless, and at least 1,200 people killed and 3,000 injured. So it was really bad – and people used to trek out to the countryside each evening to escape the bombing.
Why did the government cover up the bombings?
It seems to have been a perhaps clumsy attempt to avoid giving tactical information on bombing successes to the German high command. But the Germans still got the information they wanted, included the name of the city in their own press reports, and then these were sometimes quoted verbatim in the British press – including Hull’s name. And occasionally the city was named in first-hand British newspaper reports.
Famously Hull was named city of culture in 2017, but what is the legacy of the bombing in the city today?
Some of its old landmarks disappeared in the war as a result of the bombing, nevertheless a lot of the old town survived and still has some very impressive architecture. But you can still see oddities such as a once-terraced house in a road that was badly bombed just to the east of the River Hull, which is now an isolated, very small, detached house. To a stranger visiting that street without knowing the background, it must appear very bizarre.
Your hero, Inspector Ambrose Swift is posted to Hull to investigate murder. What’s his background?
Swift is a former cavalry officer and machine gunner who lost his arm in the Great War and wears a prosthesis. His posting to Hull is partly to remove him from the danger he became embroiled in while working for the Met and infiltrating a British fascist group – but their tentacles still reach as far as Hull. So he’s not a local, he’s a former public schoolboy, but his two deputies are working class Yorkshire folk – Jim ‘Little’ Weighton, a giant of an East Yorkshireman and part-time bare-knuckle boxer, and Kathleen Carver, a Dales farmer’s daughter.
There’s a perception that during the war that the whole country pulled together for the struggle against Nazi Germany, but there was plenty of crime, including murder (eg Gordon Cummins the ‘Blackout Ripper’). Did this surprise you when researching the novel?
It wasn’t really a surprise as I was a big fan of Foyle’s War – which featured a lot of such crime. In fact, I hope the novel will appeal to the TV series’ many fans, because Foyle’s War was created for TV – there isn’t a series of novels to accompany it. Hopefully Death in Blitz City can help to fill that gap!
Racism plays a part in the story. It’s an interesting part of England during the war which saw black and white American servicemen stationed here, and the US Army importing Jim Crow laws, with the UK government complicit. Do you think we know enough about this side of the Home Front?
No I don’t think we do, and the extent of that was a real surprise to me. Also, the way the Americans operated their own parallel judicial system for crimes their troops allegedly committed in Britain. We even lent them a prison, Shepton Mallet, which they used as an execution centre – even executing some GIs for crimes which didn’t at that time carry a capital sentence in Britain. That was utterly shocking. And they ’borrowed’ the Pierrepoints as executioners! There was a Channel 4 documentary about it in the early 2000s, but the researcher who cooperated with it claimed it was supressed. Initially pulled from its slot, and then given airtime in the ‘graveyard’ hours. Allegedly this was to avoid upsetting the Americans after 9/11. Channel 4 denied it, but that was the allegation.
What’s next – is the first in a new series?
I’d love for Death in Blitz City to be the start of a series, but at the moment it’s just a standalone. For that to change, it needs to have really good sales figures – so we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m working on a psychological thriller – something of a departure for me – centred on a university reunion. I’m enjoying trying something different, but whether it will ever see the light of day, I’ve no idea!
David Young is the author of Death in Blitz City published by Zaffre and out now.
