What Doesn't Kill Us by Ajay Close
An outstanding historical crime novel revealing the depth of misogyny in the 1980s
What Doesn’t Kill Us is a searing and challenging – but at times very humorous – historical crime novel based loosely on the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1980s. It draws on the author’s own experience of living in Sheffield – where some of the crimes were committed and where the perpetrator Peter Sutcliffe was finally caught – during that terrifying five-year period.
‘You couldn’t leave the house without thinking, “It might be me tonight,”’ Ajay Close told the Sunday Post. ‘We didn’t know anything about him, except that he was a man. And that meant any man was potentially the one who might be trying to kill you. It sounds extreme now, but the level of fear was amazing.’
This is the environment and culture that Close evokes so brilliantly in What Doesn’t Kill Us. In some respects, the 1980s exemplify LP Hartley’s dictum, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Even without the fear engendered by a serial killer on the loose, the 1980s was not a good time to be a woman in Great Britain, with casual misogyny the norm and women’s aspirations not taken seriously.
As with the real crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper, in the novel it initially seems that the killer – the “Yorkshire Butcher” – is targeting sex workers, causing the police to posit that hatred of prostitutes was his motivation. Then “decent” women fall victim and public outrage intensifies. Sadly, this is all too true. Denise Mina explored this territory in her novel The Less Dead, where murdered sex workers were considered less significant, less deserving of pity, than other women. Such an outlook reveals a new and distinct flavour of the misogyny that infested the policing (and wider public consciousness) of the time.
The novel follows two main protagonists, Liz and Charmaine. Liz Seeley works for the police and is promoted to the CID unit investigating the serial murders of The Butcher. She is a working class woman who craves advancement in her career and in her life but is confronted at every turn by naked misogyny. She is the subject of domestic violence and is appalled by the attitudes of her work colleagues, men who call prostitutes bags and black people monkeys, and whose lack of empathy, even basic human pity, is remarkable.
Charmaine is a young mixed-race woman desperate to escape her working class roots and become an artist. To that end, she is determined to win a place on a diploma course in art at the polytechnic. Like Liz, she encounters misogyny and condescension and we recognise in her experience the slow grind of reality that tempered the hopes and aspirations of so many young women in those days.
Liz and Charmaine meet when each of them becomes involved with a women’s collective living in 109 Cleopatra Street in Chapeltown, Leeds. The women who live there have all endured their own encounters with violence and misogynistic abuse and they offer each other solidarity and support. Fleeing her violent boyfriend, Liz takes up residence with the women.
The collective is based on Close’s research into the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, an extreme feminist group formed in the 1980s to lead a fightback against men, whom they saw as the enemy. There was a considerable backlash at the time against male violence, with direct action such as graffiti campaigns and “Reclaim the Night” marches becoming prevalent. Over time, some of this direct action spilled over into illegality, such as firebombing sex shops and cinemas. This spiralling into crime is explored brilliantly in the novel through the arrival at the collective of the enigmatic (but possible fraudulent) Rowena.
The collective, and its pushing back against male violence, is essential to the novel, and to the way Close planned it. She told Crime Time magazine that she wanted to write about this period, but ‘didn’t want to depict women as helpless victims.’ The actions of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists and others gave her the hook she needed, and this is what makes the novel so memorable.
In particular, it ensures that What Doesn’t Kill Us is very different from the traditional crime novel. Many reviews have picked up on the element of police procedural in it, and that is true (in as much as the largely incompetent police investigation contained any trace of procedure) but nonetheless this is not a traditional police procedural novel.
Close said in an interview for the Scots Whay Hae podcast that while she borrowed some of the techniques of crime fiction, particularly its propulsive elements, her focus wasn’t on the crimes or the investigation, but the reactions to the crimes. And so she is quite prepared to step away from the the standard crime fiction approach of clue – follow up – red herring – new clue – investigate again, a structured and linear narrative where the investigation is all-important. No, says Close, the women are all-important. The violence. The reaction to that violence. The differences in the views of CID and the feminists.
That gives the novel a deeper level of profundity, placing these heinous crimes squarely in the context of the sexist and abusive culture of the time. Pornography is a step on the way, a staging-post, leading to sexism, misogyny, abuse, violence, finally rape and murder. None of these are inseparable. It is not possible to explain the acts of the Yorkshire Ripper or the Butcher as the acts of a madman without acknowledging the culture which allowed such seeds to grow in the first place.
Close has said her intention in writing the book was to show how different life was forty-odd years ago, and that is certainly true. I did the same thing with my first novel, Cuddies Strip, which explored misogyny in the 1930s. But there’s the thing. While I can say clearly that what happened to my female protagonist in Cuddies Strip would not happen to her today, still that 1930s environment of casual misogyny persisted into the 1980s, with the baleful results that Close’s novel examines. And forty years later have we advanced? Certainly. Women are not routinely exposed to the belittling and offensive workplace “banter” they endured in the 1980s. The culture is different.
But.
But the seemingly never-ending diet of news of male violence against women today makes clear that, while we are clearly in a better place now, women – as Close said in an interview for Snack Magazine – are still at risk. What Doesn’t Kill Us, with its direct and unflinching focus on the woman’s experience, not the all-knowing detective’s, forces us to confront this truth.
Benjamin Parris wrote in The Bottle Imp: ‘What Doesn’t Kill Us is not a crime novel – it is perhaps where the crime novel should go next.’
And that is something to ponder.
References:
https://www.crimetime.co.uk/ajay-close-on-what-doesnt-kill-us/
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-post-inverness/20240128/281479281293944
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2024/06/what-doesnt-kill-us-by-ajay-close/
https://snackmag.co.uk/snack-magazine-issue-58-january-2024