Crime and the City: Liverpool

Frankly I’ve always been surprised that more crime fiction writers haven’t adopted Liverpool, or simply “the ‘pool’” for their location. It’s a city packed with character, a port town with strong working-class, multicultural communities, big enough for serious organised crime and easily the equal of London, Manchester or Glasgow as a tough British town. If Edinburgh can have a Rebus and Birmingham its Peaky Blinders why has Liverpool (Merseyside) been a bit overlooked crime fiction wise? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer, but even if Liverpool has rather been hiding its crime writing light under a bushel that doesn’t mean there’s no good crime fiction. Indeed Liverpool has a thriving “Scouse Noir” scene, known for gritty dockside settings, razor-sharp dialogue, and working-class realism.

Liverpool is having a bit of a moment on British TV right now – Scouse accents all over the place. The BBC’s This City is Ours just got renewed for a second series. The series centres around Liverpudlian crime boss Ronnie Phelan, whose desire to retire from criminal life, after one last major drug deal, triggers an intense power struggle between his long-time right-hand man, Michael Kavanagh, and Phelan’s impetuous son Jamie.

And then there’s the Netflix show Legends (as in alternative back stories undercover agents use) which is the true story, set in the early 1990s, of how British Customs infiltrated Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs in London and Liverpool.

Both excellent – but Crime and the City is a books series, so what have we got that can sniff the Mersey?

Well, let’s start with an old favourite of mine from novelist Anthony Quinn, who was born in Liverpool. The Rescue Man  (2012) is set in World War Two in his hometown. Liverpool of course, with its docks and factories, got bombed just as hard as London during the Blitz. It’s Liverpool, 1939 and historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of the city’s architectural past. When the bombings begin, Tom joins up as ‘rescue man’, retrieving the wounded and dying from the ruins of buildings, leading to danger in the wreckage and dangers of other sorts. 

And of course there are Liverpool-set series. Luca Veste is a writer of Italian and Liverpudlian heritage who studied psychology and criminology at university in Liverpool. He is the author of the DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi series, part psychological thrillers, part police procedurals. The novels are set in Liverpool, bringing the city to life in a dark and terrifying manner but not without some of that legendary Scouse humour and wit. The series starts with Dead Gone (2013) and a serial killer stalking the streets of Liverpool, gruesomely murdering victims as part of a series of infamous, unethical and deadly psychological experiments. Each victim has ties to the City of Liverpool University. Murphy and Rossi realise they’re chasing a killer like no other Liverpool has ever seen. There are four more Murphy and Rossi books in the series including The Dying Place (2014) with medical atrocities within a private psychiatric hospital; Bloodstream (2015) with high-profile local social media stars who seemingly had perfect lives turning up dead; It Never Leaves You (2016) which is a short story/novella bridging the gap between books in the series and finally Then She Was Gone (2016) with a high-profile young politician vanishing in what looks like a revenge killing.

Veste is also the author of the new Liverpool detective Mark Fletcher series beginning with Liar, Liar (2026). Fletcher once brought a serial killer to justice and earned the city’s admiration. But when he’s accused of working with Liverpool’s most notorious crime family, his legacy is shattered. Now disgraced and spiralling, Fletcher wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of the last 24 hours… and a dead body beside him. There’s more to come from Veste and Flecther in 2027. 

Conrad Jones, who’s from the north of England, is the author of the four-book Cuckoos on the Mersey series (all the books are called Cuckoos on the Mersey 1,2,3,4), a rather dark series about the child protection unit in social services who work hand in hand with the Protecting Vulnerable People Unit. Book one is set among the horrific world of cuckooing — where ruthless organised crime gangs take over the homes of society’s most vulnerable, using them as bases for drug dealing, exploitation, and unimaginable cruelty. Book two sees the Child Protection Team are called when a twelve-year-old girl is injured on the way to school and rushed to hospital. Book Three takes on the issue of teenage children being groomed by local drug dealing networks. Finally book four deals with kids getting dangerously involved in major drug deals in Liverpool.  

Indeed there are plenty of other series featuring Liverpool settings and characters – The Liverpool Mysteries Series by Jack Byrne Starting with Under the Bridge (2021), these books weave through Liverpool’s history, involving the docklands, union conflicts, secret police, and the smuggling operations of the 1950s. And the eight-book Harry Devlin Series by Martin Edwards, a former Liverpool solicitor follows a local lawyer-turned-sleuth investigating murders across Merseyside’s varying landscapes.

A few other crime novels featuring Liverpool….

• David Jackson’s A Tapping at My Door (2016) is a Liverpool-set serial killer thriller and police procedural featuring DS Nathan Cody. The killer strikes multiple time, and Cody realises the threat isn’t to the people of Liverpool after all – it’s to the police.
• Clubland (2003) by Kevin Sampson is a tense, hard-hitting thriller by a local author that looks beyond Liverpool’s tourist-friendly, revitalized docks to the dark, adrenaline-fueled underbelly of city nightclubs and gangland figures. Primary among them is Ged Brennan who takes over the clubland empire of an executed gangster, and then promptly passes the parcel to his sex-addicted cousin Moby.
• Caz Finlay’s The Boss (2019) is a gritty crime thriller with shocking twists, the best gangland drama set in Liverpool. After a stint inside, notorious gangster Nathan Conlon is back. He says he’s a changed man, but old habits die hard on Liverpool’s gritty streets. He’ll stop at nothing to reclaim his formidable criminal empire – and his long-suffering ex-wife, Grace.

And finally, a total Liverpool classic – Neville Smith’s Gumshoe (1971). Gumshoe is really long overdue a reprint as a crime classic (are you listening Penguin Modern Classics – Crime and Espionage?). The film starring Albert Finney is much better known, but the novella, published in 1971. ‘He looked like the kind of guy your mother would like to marry your sister. If you had a mother. If you had a sister.’
So begins the story of Eddie Ginley – a Liverpool bingo caller, who dreams of being Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and also happened to be an Elvis fanatic on the Mersey and wants to record Blue Suede Shoes. Then Eddie sets himself up as a private eye…in Liverpool! He puts ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. Well worth a read for a sense of 1960s Liverpool, the Scouse vernacular and their wit. 

Liverpool today may be more associated (as a port) with drugs and the crime syndicates of the north of England, but from Neville Smith to todays Merseyside procedurals, Liverpool has always been a place where the funny lines comes faster than the bullets.