As far as I can tell the Yorkshire Ripper came into being in 1975 (although I’d guess that the nickname didn’t get invented until a while after that) and Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t arrested until 1981. This fact is interesting because this book was published in 1980 and concerns the career of the fictional “Yorkshire Choker”. Since the Yorkshire Ripper looms large in my childhood memories of the news (he gets equal billing with Ethiopian famines) I found there was something rather disturbing about reading a book which must have its origins in that case.

I wonder why Hill decided to create a fictional serial killer for his detective duo. Whilst the nicknames for the real life and fictional killers instantly demand a comparison I don’t think that the killer in the book is particularly modelled on the real life version even given that background details needed in a book like this wouldn’t have been available in 1980. I wonder if writing a book about Yorkshire police in 1980 and not having them dealing with a serial killer would have been a stranger thing than the kind of crossover between real life and fiction that I see reading this book twenty years later.

There’s at least one rather clever device used in this book that I haven’t come across in mystery fiction before and the home lives of the detectives fit in neatly with the plot. I have some reservations about the actual ending of this book but on the whole I thought it was pretty good and probably my second favourite of the series this far after A Pinch of Snuff.

[This is book 6 in the Dalziel and Pascoe series]