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Bloody Winter

The initial premise of Bloody Winter was to transplant Dashiell Hammett’s Personville from his 1929 novel Red Harvest to the south Wales ironworks of the 1840s; to use Hammett’s nightmarish town – riven by criminality and industrial unrest – as template for my imagined Merthyr Tydfil, a boom town where free trade is the primary cause of social unrest. ‘This war of each against each,’ Engels writes in The Condition of the Working Class in England, ‘is the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition’. The novel, then, is a means of working out the arguments rehearsed in my article on Red Harvest (REF #4) in which the bloodletting is explained in terms of competition between the established and aspiring capitalist classes and where the state intervenes only to protect the long-term interests of the capitalist economy. The narrative structure – alternating between stories set in Wales and Ireland – suggests that the unfolding events are linked. But it is also meant to show that the same system of free trade that brought an economic boom to Wales emptied Ireland of its harvest and its people and helped to create the famine; and,as Hammett hints at in Red Harvest, that the industrial overlords not only imported cheap labour from elsewhere to keep down costs but also set native and non-native labour against one another to create a weak, divided workforce. In telling Bloody Winter as a detective novel, the aim was not to have a figure or figures who could right these wrongs but rather to show the impossibility of confronting the ills of an entire system. The result, as I explore in my other REF items,is that the crime novel both colludes with and seeks to unsettle the implementation of state power and the restoration of order.