Right to Kill

I wrote RIGHT TO KILL as a (murderous) love letter to Yorkshire, England. There’s something oddly welcoming about Yorkshire, the sense of walking into a pub in Leeds or Shipley or Wakefield… I love the people, the industrial/rural patchwork of the landscape, the sense of old industry having vanished, but the industriousness somehow still there. You can easily forget how distinctive the place and people are until you go back. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in the South, and I still feel uncomfortable. Yorkshire’s different. You come up on the grain from Heathrow, step into Leeds station at midnight, and it feels like home. It’s not England. A different country, almost. The settings in the novel are all real: the local library where I spent hours and hours as a kid; my old comprehensive school; the locations for both murders, where I used to walk the dog (I’ve had them waiting for a kill for years); the curry house in Birstall where I still eat every time I’m back; the pubs where I learnt how to get served under-age; the pie shop in Cleckheaton that inspired one of my earliest stories (a romance about pork pies)… I didn’t have to invent anything. It’s a distillation of everything I know and love about the area where I grew up. Even the name JOE ROMANO is real. He’s a friend of mine, a carpenter from Workshop. The story: I saw a young man selling drugs in Cleckheaton (where I went to a school). Drugs have now expanded from there into pretty much all the old mill towns in the area, and are a permanent feature of life. I wondered what would happen if I killed him, there and then. What would be the public reaction? Would anybody care? The only weapon I had on me was a pencil, so I decided to write about it rather than actually do it. The atmosphere surround the events in the book tries to reflect some of the current negative aspects of Yorkshire. The undercurrent of casual racism, which seems to have got gradually more overt during and after Brexit, despite the whole region having been avowedly multi-cultural for decades. There’s something different going on, something that wasn’t so palpable when I was younger. People are looking for something. A lot of people thought they’d found it when they voted for Brexit. But it’s still there. It’s not a lost cause, though. At least, JOE ROMANO doesn’t think so.