Jennie Godfrey on the Inspiration Behind The List of Suspicious Things

I have always been interested in how world events play out in ordinary people’s lives, and how societal shifts are reflected in small communities. In fact, two of my favourite novels – To Kill a Mockingbird and Demon Copperhead – are those that show you the world and something important about what it means to be human through the eyes of small towns. Writing The List of Suspicious Things was my opportunity to really explore that with events that took place during my own lifetime in the late 1970s in West Yorkshire. 

At the time, the UK was facing macro issues that resonate strongly today. The world felt politically unstable, the economy was struggling, and issues around race and inequality were creating unrest. The north of England was particularly impacted economically, and West Yorkshire – where I was born – had seen the closure of the mills that so many towns relied on, resulting in high unemployment and all the consequences that brings. 

Then there were the murders of women by a man then known as ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. Starting in 1975 and continuing until 1980, they brought a new level of fear and uncertainty to the community. As Miv, the twelve-year-old at the heart of the novel says, ‘We were starting to realise that Yorkshire had changed forever in ways we couldn’t fully comprehend.’ However, this wasn’t only about the murders. It was also about once thriving towns becoming ghosts of their former selves. 

I was a young child at the time, and while I would have been unable to articulate it then, those issues affected my upbringing in some subtle and some less subtle ways. I can clearly remember my excitement at having to eat my tea by candlelight during the electricity rationing of 1973, but I can also remember the informal segregation of streets by race in our town, along with the racist graffiti that adorned the rundown, shuttered mill buildings of the town where I grew up. I learned what the National Front was after asking what the initials I saw emblazoned on many walls stood for. 

My most vivid childhood memory, however, is of the day that Peter Sutcliffe was finally caught in 1981 and confessed to the murders of thirteen women, and as it became quickly apparent that my dad had worked with him – he was a mechanic at the depot where Sutcliffe was a driver. The shock at how close he came to my family reverberated through our house. It was this memory that inspired the writing of the novel and the character of Miv, who realises that the Yorkshire Ripper could be someone she knows – someone in her neighbourhood – and recruits her best friend Sharon to help her catch him. The two of them write a list of suspicious things and investigate them one by one, and in doing so uncover all the secrets of their small town, as well as finding themselves in the process.  

When I wrote The List of Suspicious Things, I wanted to reflect that relationship between what was happening in society and how it played out in people’s everyday lives, but also where change can happen on an individual basis too. I wanted it to be a story that represented hope and demonstrated human resilience, no matter the circumstances. I also wanted to write a novel that didn’t have London in it, except as a vague threat of a move ‘down south,’ and to reflect ordinary lives, away from the bigger cities. As I say in the foreword to the book, The List of Suspicious Things is my love letter to Yorkshire and to the humour and grit that is associated with the county of my birth. So, while the backdrop of the story is bleak, the kindness and humour that the characters bring make for a hopeful read. 

I have been amazed by how many readers have reported back to me their own memories of the time, and how closely related they are to those in the novel, especially those not from Yorkshire. I’ve had messages from people all over the world (including Brazil, Germany, India and France) who relate closely to Miv, Aunty Jean, Omar and Ishtiaq. But I have also been thrilled by how many younger readers have loved it and felt it captured something of their own experiences of growing up and coming of age in a time of uncertainty and upheaval in the world. My hope is that this is a novel for everyone.