Danuta Reah, who has also written crime books as Carla Banks, lives in South Yorkshire and that’s the setting for her new novella, Not Safe. It’s one of the titles in the excellent Crime Express series of short novels/long stories/novellas, and weighs in at 86 pages. One of the beauties of this length of story is that you can often read it in one sitting, allowing you to really get into the story and go through it as if you’re living it. That’s provided the story is well-told, and boy, this one is.
It’s the story of Farah Jafari, a refugee or asylum seeker living on the streets of a northern city, though we’re almost 2/3 the way through the book before there’s any mention of where this might be. Then comes a reference to the South Yorkshire Police, and it’s another 19 pages before the setting is revealed: Sheffield. Normally this would be a fault, but the fact that the location isn’t revealed gives it a timeless and universal quality. The same kind of thing is happening in many cities of the world, and certainly throughout Europe - people away from their homeland, scrambling to survive, making ephemeral friendships and sometimes fatal connections.
A Dark Story
Never begin a novel with an account of the weather, is one of the so-called rules of fiction-writing, but the bleak beginning to Not Safe shows that rules are meant to be broken, if you know what you’re doing. ‘The night was cold. The temperature had been dropping all day and now a sleety rain was falling, making the paving stones gleam in the lamp light’. The author’s simple but gritty style immediately creates an image, a feel, as we’re introduced to one of the main characters, Amir, a refugee heading reluctantly for a night shelter. The bag on his back contains all his possessions - a change of clothes, his sleeping bag, a wind-up torch, tea bags, biscuits, and some books, including his copy of the Koran. This simple description of his pathetic but important possessions propels us on the first page right into the world of the refugee.
Farah’s Journey
Soon Amir meets Farah, the character around whom this bleak story revolves. Amir tries to help her, Farah thinks she knows what he might want in return. Is she right? When Farah runs away, still wearing the coat Amir gave her to keep her warm, what will happen?
By this time we have met some of the other characters in the story, including DC Tina Barraclough, who is drawn into the story even though she is officially ‘off the case’. The police officer who is off the case has become a cliché in crime writing, but Barraclough is as real as the people whose world she is investigating. It’s one of the book’s virtues that all the characters are real, every one of them a convincing character, from the do-good vicar who runs the shelter with his bitchy helper, the sinister-seeming Andre Motombo who was on duty when Amir and Farah arrived together, and the handful of Barraclough’s police colleagues who we meet.
If this were a bog-standard crime novel then Barraclough would be the main character, around whom the story spins, but the beauty of Not Safe is that all the characters are equally important. It begins with Amir and his history, it ends with Barraclough and her future, and in between is a murder mystery that keeps you turning the pages in the old ‘whodunnit?’ tradition. You also feel you’ve had an insight into the sad world that you sometimes glimpse out of the corner of your eye, the world of immigrants and refugees where sometimes violence erupts.
Not Safe by Danuta Reah
Not Safe is published at £4.99 in the UK by Five Leaves Publications as part of their Crime Express series of crime novellas. Other titles include California by Ray Banks and Claws by Stephen Booth.
Mike Gerrard - Mike is an award-winning travel writer who has worked for National Geographic, the London Times, and many other clients. ...
