Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Northern England. Once the powerhouse of the British Empire’s steel manufacturing – hardly a house or hotel in the British Empire didn’t have knives and forks stamped with the “Sheffield Steel” logo. It still exists, but late twentieth century deindustrialisation has seen the city fall on harder times and have to look for new industries. Perhaps the worst of the loss of manufacturing (coal and manufacturing as well as steel) is behind Sheffield now but it’s still a tough town, as its crime writing reflects….
Let’s start with the 12-book DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) Matilda Darke series, a dozen procedurals set in and around Sheffield. Darke heads the region’s ‘Murder Investigation Team”. A great series, but perhaps we should pick out several that really take you deeper into Sheffield? Book five in the series, The Murder House (2020), begins the morning after a wedding reception at a suburban home in Sheffield. The bride’s entire family are stabbed to death in a frenzied attack more violent than anything DCI Matilda Darke could ever have imagined. Or perhaps book seven in the series, Time is Running Out (2021), with a lone gunman is on a deadly rampage around Sheffield. It will turn out to be a near fatal investigation for Darke. There’s also book eleven in the series, Below Ground (2023), with a body found in an abandoned car on the outskirts of Sheffield, a suspect who resides in the nearby Supermax Wakefield Prison
WJ Willans has written the first in a Sheffield set series featuring Inspector Jack Wolf. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (2017) starts with a kidnapped woman being repeatedly drugged. She eventually manages to escape and seeks help. Detective inspector Wolf of Sheffield’s South Yorkshire Police is assigned the case and is determined to find out who did this and why the young woman is still being threatened. In Wolf’s Bane (2022) teenagers are dying on the streets of Sheffield and no one knows why. Jack Wolf and his team are brought in to investigate and solve the murders.
Danuta Reah is a prolific writer who often returns to her hometown of Sheffield for inspiration and standalone novels. If there’s a Queen of Sheffield crime then it’s Danuta Reah. In Bleak Water (2011) the new gleaming city centre contrast with the old industrial Sheffield canal – overgrown, run-down and deserted. Except for a small, innovative gallery housed in one of the local; abandoned warehouses – the perfect site for an exhibition reworking Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death. Then a young woman’s body is found in the canal and Elisa Eliot, the gallery’s curator, is drawn into the investigation. In Silent Playgrounds (2009) what should be a straightforward investigation leads DI Steve McCarthy into a web of lies and evasions after kids go missing in a suburban Sheffield park where the city meets the countryside.
Also by Danuta Reah, Night Angels (2011) is a psychological suspense novel of set in Sheffield and the nearby city of Hull. One winter’s night, Gemma, a young research worker is driving to Sheffield across the Snake Pass, an often-treacherous road running from Manchester to Sheffield. As a game, she pretends that the black BMW she keeps seeing is following her. And then, on the loneliest stretch of the road, without explanation, her car breaks down. She is never seen again. Meanwhile over in Hull, the body of a woman is discovered battered to death in a hotel bathroom; the only clue to her identity is a card bearing the name of an escort agency notorious for its suspected trafficking in Eastern European women. Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan sees a connection and concludes there may be a serial killer on the loose.
And one last book from Danuta Reah (told you she was the queen of Sheffield crime!), Only Darkness (2010). Debbie Sykes is a young college lecturer in Sheffield whose ordered life is about to be changed forever. One stormy winter’s night, waiting for the late train home, Debbie is acutely aware of being alone – the woman who usually shares her evening vigil is not there. Vulnerability turns to fear, though, when she turns to see a sinister figure looming between her and the safety of the street. The next day, she hears that the missing woman has been found murdered by the man they call the Strangler, a brutal killer who dumps his victims on isolated stretches of railway track. Debbie is scared and only Rob Neave, ex-policeman and college security officer, seems to take her seriously.
A couple of true crime books that feature Sheffield with noting. Margaret Drinkall’s Murder and Crime Sheffield (2012) looks at a number of notorious Victorian-era crimes in Sheffield, an industrial city where so many were anonymous and rarely missed as people flocked into the factories and lives of poverty and meanness. Meanwhile, Birmingham may have the Peaky Blinders, but Sheffield had gangs that could give them a run for their money. JP Bean’s The Sheffield Gang Wars (1981) is a classic of English true crime while Ben W Johnson’s Sheffield’s Most Notorious Gangs (2018) reworks many of the same tales. The Mooney Gang, the Park Brigade and others were composed of young men who came back from World War One – damaged, looking for excitement and not wanting to simply walk back into the grim factories. It was a time when it looked like the gangs would roam free, the police powerless to stop them. But the British state decided that one of the Empire’s most important industrial cities could not simply be left to the control of gangs.
And then of course there’s a myriad of books about Peter Sutcliffe, the notorious “Yorkshire Ripper” of the 1970s convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. After his reign of terror across Manchester and Yorkshire he was finally arrested in Sheffield by South Yorkshire Police for driving a car with false number plates in January 1981. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent life sentences. Naturally Sutcliffe’s horrific crimes have inspired a raft of fiction and non-fiction books. The best known and most obsessively read (and adapted for TV by Britain’s Channel 4) is David Peace’s Red Riding quartet comprises the novels Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002). The series, set largely in the northern English cities of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester fictionalizes the investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper (Yorkshire traditionally divided into three areas known as the Ridings – Sheffield is in the West Riding).
And finally, a real treat of a psychological thriller – Russ Thomas’s Nighthawking (2021). The body of a young woman is found in Sheffield’s Botanical Gardens. DS Adam Tyler determines that she’s been there for months and would have gone undiscovered for years – except someone returned in the dead of night to dig her up. Tyler’s investigation draws him into the secretive world of nighthawkers: treasure-hunters who operate under cover of darkness, seeking the lost and valuable.
Sheffield may not today be the powerhouse of Empire industry it once was but neither is it the grim deindustrialised city it became in the 1970s and 1980s as industry closed, moved away and the British mining industry collapsed. Today Sheffield is seen as a pretty leafy city, close to motorways connecting the country but only a short drive into glorious countryside. Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday means the city has two top football clubs, as well as a couple of major universities. But that doesn’t mean it’s all cosy and good news in Sheffield and the city still has a great crime writing tradition.
