Thoroughly enjoying Benjamin Myers’s These Darkening Days, a beautifully written noirish thriller set in the Pennines. Lots of literary and musical allusions (including a band called The Thank-Yous, a thinly disguised Unthanks?); really atmospheric and gripping. Looking forward to reading his other books, particularly The Gallows Pole.

Benjamin Myers is a writer and journalist from Durham. His writing has appeared in the New Statesman, the Guardian, New Scientist, The Quietus, and others. His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers' Award. His new novel, The Gallows Pole, is forthcoming with Blue Moose Books in May 2017.

Jessica Beasley, an MA student of Creative Writing at The University of Nottingham spoke to him about his writing on behalf of The Letters Page.

Literature and music have always gone hand in hand for Benjamin Myers. His journey in music journalism started as a staff writer at Melody Maker, the UK’s former leading weekly pop and rock music newspaper. Over the last fifteen years he has also scripted music documentaries, written several best-selling music biographies and co-owned an independent record label, Captains of Industry. With music so integral to Myers’ life, it’s little wonder that it’s been a dominant feature in his fiction:

‘I love music,’ he admits, ‘but unlike a lot of people I know it is the not the be-all and end-all for me. I’m probably more intrigued by the people who make the music – those rare unique characters. An example would be someone like Iggy Pop, whose approach to life, his physicality and his body of written and recorded work, though very patchy, is incomparable. I’d say I’m definitely more obsessed by writing fiction and poetry.’

There is a merging of fiction and post-punk culture in his novel, Richard (2010) which tells a fictional version of what happened to Richey Edwards, the guitarist and co-lyricist of The Manic Street Preachers who walked out of a London hotel in 1995 and disappeared. The Quietus said of it: ‘Offstage, alone and out of sight, Richard is fully imagined…descriptions of the landscape are so fresh you can smell the moss.’ Vividly told in first and second person narrative, the novel combines autobiography and fiction in a series of chronological flashbacks to convey the imagined circumstances of Richey’s vanishing.

‘It was inspired by the great Norwegian novel, Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, published in 1890, in which a young man has a breakdown by way of a series of manic episodes. My initial idea was to attempt a modern re-write, but at the same time I was also discussing Richey Edwards with my (now) wife, who is an even bigger music fan than I am – what happened to him, when and why - and the two strands of thought seemed to coalesce.’

While he still has a hand in the music industry, Benjamin has seen a natural departure from music journalism over time and I explored why:

‘Writing about music is a skilled discipline,’ he explains; ‘there are tight deadlines, very restricted word counts and a basic assumption that you should have some degree of understanding of your subject. But there is also a sense of disposability there – of words being cast out, read and then discarded. This was especially true during the heyday of print media, which has slowly been declining for years. I felt like I had other stories I wanted to tell, away from a music world that sometimes feels like it is locked into a cycle of repetition, of trends ebbing and flowing.’

Myers upcoming novel, The Gallows Pole, has been hotly tipped as fiction to look out for in 2017 by Alex Preston at the Guardian who describes it as ‘a windswept, brutal tale of eighteenth-century Yorkshire told in starkly beautiful prose.’ ‘The narrative,’ Myers explains, ‘is based on historical events concerning a murderous 18th century gang of forgers called the Cragg Vale Coiners. Comprised of weavers and land-workers, they operated round where I live in the Upper Calder Valley. Their enterprise nearly destroyed the local economy and ended in deaths… It’s one of the great lesser-known stories of English history.’ With the lens on hidden lives it promises to open up issues often driven underground. The novel has been commended ahead of its release with a Roger Deakin Award and is coined as a ‘tough tight novel that refuses to be ignored.’