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<\/p>\nBy Max Dunbar.<\/p>\n
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Hood Rat<\/em><\/a>, Gavin Knight, Picador 2011<\/p>\n In summer 2009 the shadow home secretary Chris Grayling \u00a0visited \u00a0Manchester’s traditional crime flashpoint Moss Side as part of the corporate softening of the Conservative Party’s image. After doing the \u00a0usual multi-agency shit \u00a0and police patrols, \u00a0Grayling concluded that \u00a0‘Even as someone well aware of the gang problem in our society, it was a shocking and enlightening experience. What was going on there at the time was nothing short of an urban war…. [classic crime drama] \u00a0The Wire<\/em> has become a part of real life in our country too.’<\/p>\n If you are going to reference The Wire <\/em>you need to get your figures straight. Grayling’s speech outraged the local press, which pointed out<\/a> \u00a0that Baltimore, where David Simon’s masterpiece is set, suffered 234 murders in 2008 while Manchester had just 35. Also, Baltimore has a much smaller population, at just 600,000 to Manchester’s 2.5 million. Moss Side is a scary name to throw around, but everyone recognises the area is much safer than it was when Grayling’s party last enjoyed power. (‘Twenty years ago, you drive through here fast<\/em>,’ a middle-aged cab driver told me when I asked him if he’d known the place long.) The illegality of weapons helps. Even professional criminals have to pay over the odds for a gun that’s never been fired. Grayling’s speech \u00a0damaged Cameron’s strategy to win over the \u00a0north with One Nation philanthropy and illustrated, perhaps, why the Tories will never be the party of the inner city.<\/p>\n Yet there were similarities, that grow more visible as the recession continues. Both Manchester and Baltimore are great industrial cities, and the death of manufacturing has caused a working-class crisis in both cities. Consummate junkie Bubbles strips metal from \u00a0tin roofing and the aluminium walls of abandoned rowhouses \u00a0to feed his habit. In Manchester, in fact all over the UK, we’re losing steel, lead, copper, and \u00a0iron \u00a0from roofs and phone lines and gullies and chimney stacks and railway stations. Donations of clothes left outside charity shops overnight will likely be gone by dawn. Like the price of scrap metal, the price of scrap clothes has rocketed. There is even a suggestion that organised crime is involved in the stolen metal trade. In The Corner<\/em><\/a>, a street-level precursor, Simon describes this as a kind of cannibalisation of the city.<\/p>\n Gavin Knight’s book follows both sides of the law in Manchester, London and Glasgow. Like Simon and Burns, Knight absents himself from the narrative, which is localised and focused on single characters in three cities. This has confused British reviewers, who like their crime clear-cut. Some critics compared Hood Rat <\/em>to David Simon’s police reportage book Homicide, <\/em>others dismissed it entirely as fiction.<\/p>\n Truth be told, there is a feeling of unreality to the whole thing. \u00a0GMP’s Anders Svensson is a troubled idealist copper in the McNulty mode. By the end of his adventure the man’s second marriage has fallen apart due to his dedication and long hours, leaving Svensson spending many evenings at a strip club. You expect the guy to tell us that he doesn’t always play it by the book but, goddamnit, he gets results.<\/p>\n The Manchester chapters are littered with traces of \u00a0verisimilitude – GMP’s ‘Ageing Behind Bars’<\/a> \u00a0posters, the evidence lifted from bullet striation marks, all this jolts the reader back into reality. As Knight tells it, the two targets, Merlin and Flow, were wanted for two murders, one of which was killed at a drive-by past the wake of the other. Cell siting on Merlin’s phone created a dot pattern identical to the route of the murder car. Stringer Bell would have turned his face to the wall at the mere thought.<\/p>\n
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