Rough Justice: Stephen Leather’s Sturm und Drang

When Jeremy Duns was undergoing his investigation into the fraud, bully and thriller writer, Stephen Leather, he mentioned a Leather novel called Rough Justice, and linked to a talkboard where commenters shared their impressions of the book. One comment runs: ‘I have just finished reading a Stephen Leather book, and afterwards I was left with an uncomfortable feeling that he could well be a racist. Yes – his characters are doing the talking, but they get their strange ideas from him.’ Another: ‘This man in my opinion if he is not a racist, he does a very good impression of being one.’

A few weeks back, I came across a copy of Rough Justice in a second hand bookshop, and was curious enough to buy it. I’ve just finished the novel. It’s extremely disturbing. In it the hero, ex SAS man turned undercover cop Spider Shepherd, is tasked with investigating a group of undercover TSG officers who have taken it themselves to rampage around the city, killing and torturing violent criminals. As his investigation progresses, Spider becomes conflicted and develops a sympathy with the vigilante cops that is at odds with his stated mission to destroy the rogue cell. The ethical issue here is obvious and worth exploring, with hard questions about the limitations of blind justice, courts that let victims down, and the consequences of taking the law into your own hands.

So far, so reasonable. Many crime writers have written on these timeless themes, the obvious recent example being the Dexter novels of Jeff Lindsay, which chronicle the adventures of a serial killer who targets only other villains. Leather’s book carries the same flaws as many airport thrillers, with clunking dialogue attribution, cheesy horseplay, two-dimensional characters and a fetish for military gadgetry: ‘Shepherd’s bergen was a GS issue, general service. The troopers were running with SAS-issue, bigger, with a zipped compartment on the lid, a zip on the outer central pouch, buckles on the side lids’ – etcetera. Someone should also tell Leather’s crowdsourced editors that you don’t need to capitalise common nouns like ‘regiment’ or italicise the word ‘latte’. But Leather does the job, he can tell a story and keep you reading. He’s also done his research, or at least paid someone else to do it. The procedural details ring true.

But here’s the thing. Leather is obsessed with race and immigration. The villains targeted by his vigilante squad are overwhelmingly black minority ethnic, and they are killed and tortured in loving detail. Leather is smart enough to throw a few white bodies onto the pyre, British paedophiles and child killers, but mainly the bad guys are sex-trafficking Romanians, Ba’athist cab drivers, Jamaican gangsters. Even when they are not getting hanged and castrated by his TSG squad, immigrants are mostly portrayed in a bad light. Spider Shepherd, waiting to board a ferry to Ireland, sees a ‘group of Romanian gypsies… the men unshaven and wearing cheap suits, the women with gold hooped earrings and brightly coloured skirts, several holding small babies.’ Soon as boarding is announced, ‘The gypsies pushed their way to the front of the queue.’

It’s those little details that are the most unsettling, because they show that Leather can be subtle when he wants to, but mostly the master storyteller lets his characters speak freely. Interrogating a black London-born criminal, his TSG squad laugh when the gangbanger declares: ‘I’m as British as you.’

The policeman looked pained. ‘Two words, Denzel. Dog. Stable.’

Holmes frowned. ‘What?’

‘Just because a dog is born in a stable doesn’t make it a horse.’

This Powellite racism is the very least of it. Barely a section passes without an anti-immigrant tirade. Here’s a few from pages arrived by flipping through the book at random.

‘All we ever get over here are the bad ones,’ said the policeman. He took a long drag at his cigarette and blew smoke at Mironescu. ‘We get the pickpockets, the gypsy beggars, the hookers, and that’s about it. Why do we never hear about Romanian doctors or Romanian engineers or even Romanian cockle pickers?’

—

‘All right, that’s a joke,’ he said. ‘And maybe not a good one. But it’s a joke based on what’s really happening to our country. We’re becoming the sort of country where the English worker has to bust his gut and pay taxes to support a flood of foreign so-called asylum seekers and spongers, people who’ve never lifted a finger to help this country.’

—

‘People are fed up with being treated like third-class citizens in their own country. They’re sick of seeing relatives pushed to the back of the housing queue or having to wait for medical treatment while asylum seekers are fast-tracked for whatever they want. You know why the Left hate the BNP and England First so much? Because when they enter into debates with the likes of Simon Page or Nick Griffin they get trounced. They talk sense, and that’s why they have to throw eggs at them and scream, ‘Nazi scum,’ and accuse them of wanting a second Holocaust. That’s not what they’re about, Brian. They’re talking a lot of sense.’

I should say that part of the plot involves the infiltration of a BNP splinter group called England First which has a casual link to the vigilante cops. The infiltrator, Spider’s best friend Jimmy ‘Razor’ Sharpe, goes to one meeting and is immediately dazzled by the speaker (‘Why isn’t he standing as an MP somewhere?’) and drops a fifty into the collection tin. England First is portrayed completely uncritically, and its views are mirrored by characters outside the organisation. Even Spider Shepherd himself concludes that ‘Our country is full of foreign murderers and rapists and we let them live here because nobody can be bothered to send them home… I’m talking about justice… Rough justice, maybe. But real justice.’

It’s a common critical fallacy that the characters represent the author but in this case I think there’s something in it. It’s the sense of creepy consensus that gets you: Leather can’t even be bothered to put up a decent straw man to knock down, the other side of the argument delegated to a politically correct Bramshill detective and a picket of Searchlight demonstrators dismissed as mindless thugs. Also, almost every immigrant we meet in Rough Justice turns out to be a war criminal travelling under a false name. ‘So you spin the old victim story,’ a TSG vigilante snarls at an Iraqi criminal, ‘and you get an Amnesty International lawyer on your case and the next thing you know you’re being fast-tracked to British citizenship.’ A brief chat with a UKBA caseworker is all Leather would need to understand that practically no one is ‘fast-tracked to British citizenship.’ Still, foreigners are welcome in Leather’s world: as long as they know their place. There is the odd amusing Asian IT technician or fluttering Eastern European au pair. Which leads me onto Leather’s portrayal of women. Sure, he has a plucky kickass TSG officer, but mostly the second sex are represented by pouting primary school teachers, flirtatious psychologists and finger-wagging bosses mostly likely promoted under diversity quota.

Is Rough Justice, then, a ‘racist novel’? I hate classifying fiction according to political considerations. What I will say is that Leather doesn’t have the sophistication, or the desire, to take a step back. Here is the fictional TSG officer Barry Kelly talking about black on black crime:

It’s young black men who use knives and guns and the sooner we accept that and get it out into the open the better. But we can’t because it’s racist so we pretend it’s not black crime and we talk in code. We say that the case is being investigated by Operation Trident, which is just a clever way of saying that the assailants are black. But every cop who has ever walked a beat knows that when it comes to knives and guns, it’s young black males that are the problem. If you removed every young black male from the streets of London tomorrow there’d be no knife crime and no gun crime.

And here is Leather, writing on his blog:

A story broke today about a gang of youths in Hackney who killed a schoolboy. What the story doesn’t say, of course, is that the gang was made up of black youths. One of the themes covered in Dark Justice is that the major problem in London at the moment isn’t gun crime, or knife crime, it’s black crime, gangs of feral young black men who have no respect for society or the law. Of course it’s not politically correct to say so, but it’s the truth. Until they’re dealt with and dealt with harshly, the black gangs are going to continue to run riot. I’m not suggesting vigilante cops is the way to go, but we have to do something and soon.

This is what unsettles people about Rough Justice, and Leather’s persona in general: not just his racism but a strong personal viciousness that seeps into his writing, and which everyone eventually senses.

After I wrote about Leather last year, I had an interesting comment on my blog from the bookseller and publisher, Scott Pack. I think it’s worth quoting in full.

Stephen Leather was once interviewed on Open Book. It was a piece about reading in prisons. Leather’s books were the most widely read in Britain’s prisons at the time, might still be for all I know. He was asked something about whether or not he put real people in his novels and gleefully replied that he once used an ex-girlfriend as a character. He had her raped, put in the boot of a car and driven over a cliff.