Letter from Manchester, UK: Black Lives Matter It is snowing here in Manchester, England, the evening of 7th January 2021.  I’ve been watching across media astonishing images of the US Capitol building being invaded by an aggrieved white mob. My mind turns to the summer of 2020 when the Black Lives Matter movement landed here in England. It ignited much soul-searching among the majority white population of England.  While triggered by the USA George Floyd video, there had been in advance of the Floyd video a groundswell of unease at police action in England, an unease that competed with the cuddly images of British police that have prevailed for decades in England, promulgated by  TV series from Z Cars in the 60’s all the way through to Inspector Morse and  Lewis of 2015. The bedrock moral position of these British TV cop series was the fundamental decency of the British police force.  There were of course voices that dissented from this cosy view, many of them black. The poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in his poetry/song collection Dread Beat and Blood (1975) in particular denounced the London police force’s Special Patrol Group (SPG: similar to Nigeria’s SARS). The SPG was disbanded in 1987. But police misconduct in England persisted. Most recently a documentary film called Ultra Violence (November 2020) held an unwavering gaze on continuing British police force brutality and state killing, particularly of black people, platforming the voices of numerous families who had lost members to brutal police hands and who have bravely campaigned at grassroots level against this ultra-violence. Something snapped here upon the release of the George Floyd video. Finally, abuse that had been hidden away, dismissed, denied or contested was caught on film in broad daylight and shown across the world. People in England were roused to righteous indignation. George Floyd, they were saying, is our experience too. Let me pause now to unpack the ‘our’ in the statement ‘our experience’.  Because it signals an important shift, and one that is observable in the photos taken of BLM events across England. There are black folk in the photos of protestors, yes, but also by many young white people: White people, especially the young ones, were owning their part in the problem. It is this shift that holds promise. Black power salutes being wielded by white youths in solidarity with their black friends. White privilege was finally being understood.  Of course, there is a backlash. The invasion of the US Capitol by White Supremacists is the most recent example. But no battle for justice is ever easy.  And in so far as the young people in England are on the side of fairness and prepared to stand up and be counted,  campaigning in public for an end to the brutality of the unjust use of force by police, in that measure, we can contemplate the future here with some confidence. Yes, it is a long game.  But this old head says that youth, mobilised in the cause of justice, is unstoppable and will bring about radical change. That’s my view from where I stand here in Manchester, England. How do you see it from where you are?   Sincerely,   Pete Kalu, Manchester, UK.   Photographer: Naomi Kalu A British Council  International Digital Collaboration Project @LitBritish...

  Black Rain Falling is a cracking crime novel by Jacob Ross, the second in his ‘Digger’ Digson series, set in the fictional Caribbean island of Camaho. Crime writers occupying the highest plinths of the crime fiction pantheon – Mosley, Neely, Hammett, Highsmith and Chandler – might give Ross a nod for his achievement: he has a consummate talent for balancing the various energies needed for a contemporary crime story – action, suspense, sustained multi-faceted evolution of major characters – all the while weaving a yarn that engrosses. It helps that Ross has an indecent raft of sheer writing verve. This writerly review looks at some elements of what Ross does. Setting, Modernity, the crime novel and Black Rain Falling The term modernity was coined by Baudelaire in his essay, The Painter of Modern Life. He saw it as inextricably bound up with the city and the shock of the new: ‘the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis’. One of crime fiction’s earliest pioneers was Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s short story Murder at the Rue Morgue is often advanced as the very first detective story, and is set in the city. Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories lifted many ideas intrinsic to our understanding of ‘the city’ from Poe and from the French pioneer, Gaboriau. So it came to be that detective fiction and the city became linked in the popular imagination. When this genre history is hooked to black presence, which in the UK and in USA has often been clustered around cities, then it is no surprise that the major black practitioners of crime fiction – Barbara Neely, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke in the USA; in the UK, Dreda Say Mitchell, Courttia Newland and Mike Phillips, among others, have invariably set their novels in a fictitious or actual city. Ross’s ‘Digger’ series is different. The action takes place on the fictitious Caribbean island of Camaho (pop. 100,000). Ross himself was born in Grenada, and his love of the Caribbean permeates Black Rain Falling. His Camaho world is a particularly Caribbean mix of the urban town/city, and the village. Ross’s other works (particularly his novel Pynter Bender, but also many of his short stories), evidence a keen poetic sensibility and, in venturing into crime fiction, Ross has not abandoned this gift: a sense of poetry infuses his crime novels. Nowhere does Ross’s lyricism ride higher than when he describes the Camaho natural environment. There are sentences other writers would die for in the descriptions. Here are a few examples: ‘All month it had been like this: dry, dusting, sapping; the air filled with the lament of suffering livestock that were hugging the shadows of he forest receding all the way to the hilltops. With all that dryness a pusson felt afraid to strike a match.’ ‘The slope of a hill, the type and thickness of the vegetation made a sound when the wind ran over it, that a pusson heard nowhere else in the world. Up here, among the ferns and bamboo and ancient thick-headed trees, the Belvedere mountains sobbed and mourned.’ (Shades of Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow) ‘Old Hope village spread out across the hillside on which we lived. Directly ahead were the foothills, pulling my gaze all the way up to the Mardi Gras mountains – purple-dark in the early light.’   Western rationality, African Cosmology and Black Rain Falling Western rationalism has often been the go-to default for crime fiction, indeed there are aspects of the  crime genre, especially its centring of science, rationality and logic, that make crime fiction in many of its iterations a paean to Western Progress and rationalism. However, there are other cosmologies in existence, and black writers have often explored the literary potential of giving the narrative breath of life to non-Western ways of seeing the world (egs: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,  Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ Tail of the Bluebird; many of the short stories of Leone Ross and Ironesen Okojie). Black crime writers do this while still maintaining some of the genre’s standard detective tropes of logic and rationalism. Where is Black Rain Falling positioned in this Western materialism – Africanist cosmology dialectic? Early on in the novel, a glimmer of non-Western cosmology is given. Digson tells of how his grandmother, who raised him, described the world to him: ‘Olokun is the god-woman of the Dark waters. She rule the bottom of the ocean, yunno. The only one who know what happen to all them African who never reach this side of the Atlantic.’  As with Digson’s grandmother, the Camaho rural women are the major repositories of knowledge based on an alternative cosmology. They carry a spiritual connection with the land and the history of the people within their customs, manners and oral stories. When Digson sees a group of women gathering urgently: ‘They brought to mind my grandmother, who had mothered me, muttering in a closed room with other women that she’d gathered around her. I remembered the secrecy of their ritual cleansing – women, preparing one of their own for the trouble to come.’ ‘These elders would be carrying in their heads the family tree of every person on Kara Island and their connections to each other. They still named their children...