River Rats, the second book in my crime mystery series, is unashamedly set in Bath and begins with the coshing of a local magistrate and the disposal of his body in the weir at Pulteney Bridge.
It’s a tale which explores the tensions between a small community of liveaboard narrowboat owners, local residents, corrupt councillors and violent property developers. Some might feel that beautiful, historic and genteel Bath has done little to deserve being chosen as the setting for such nefarious goings-on. I beg to differ.
I am certain that when Bath was at its fashionable height, the arrival of monied pleasure-seekers from London and their grand country houses would also have attracted legions of ne’er-do-wells. As the nobility danced or played at their gaming tables, an underworld of conmen, pickpockets, footpads, blackmailers and cutthroats would have gathered around them like flies around the horse-dung on Grand Parade. Even Richard Beau Nash, who dictated the rules of conduct and dress during the winter months of the Season, turned out to be a corrupt profiteer.
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Spool forward nearly 300 years and my first encounter with Bath’s criminal underbelly came after I was hired as a news reporter on the Bath Evening Chronicle. Among my duties was ‘police calls’ which involved an early morning visit to the old police station in Manvers Street (which is now part of the University of Bath). A bored Duty-Inspector would flick through the crime log of the previous 24-hours and throw us an occasional tit-bit. Then it would be off to the city’s Magistrates’ Court to check on the scheduled business of the day before returning to the paper’s offices in Westgate Street to begin filling the outer pages before the lunchtime deadline and a pint in The Grapes.
This routine quickly opened my eyes to life in the city that transcended open-top tourist buses, guides in Regency costumes and busking entertainers outside the Pump Room. It told of drug-users committing burglary and other crimes to feed their habit and the drug-dealers who preyed on them. It described a city whose affluent visitors attracted alcoholic beggars and shoplifters from across the UK. It even provided the occasional murder. I well recall going to Bristol Crown Court where a Bath man was accused of burying his wife under the patio only to witness one of my aunts being sworn onto the jury. My time on the daily local newspaper – the mid 1980s – also coincided with the excitement of gold bullion villains living in the city’s surrounding hills.
Eventually I moved away to a job on BBC Points West in Bristol and then to other BBC news centres around the country. But I never forgot my experience on ‘The Bath Chron’ and eagerly fell on the city and the River Avon for my second foray into fiction writing. It’s easy to be blinded by Bath’s UNESCO status, its affluent well-dressed residents, the astonishing property prices in the estate agents’ windows and the endless coachloads of year-round foreign tourists. But Bath remains, and always will be, a real living city rather than a Georgian theme park. It has astonishing Crescents and run-down housing estates. It has beautiful, elevated vistas and deep social problems. In short, it has and will continue to have, crime.
So, I hope readers of River Rats won’t feel the need to suspend disbelief too much as my journalist hero, Jack Johnson and his pal Nina Wilde uncover intimidation and expose corruption in the city the Romans called Aquae Sulis. I strongly suspect it was there in their time too!
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River Rats is published by Orphans Publishing Ltd and is the second book in the Johnson and Wilde crime mystery series by Andy Griffee. It follows Canal Pushers and a third book in the series called Oxford Blues will be published this July.
Find out more at: andygriffee.co.uk
This article was first published in 2021.