The First Cut

Afterword

8th September 1987

Coast road, Whitby-Staithes. Rolling farmland, patchwork of hedged fields (cows grazing) light brown after harvest amp; wheat-colored barley etc. End abruptly at cliffs, pinkish strata, sea clear light blue, sun glinting silver on distant ship. Flock of gulls on red-brown field. Clumps of trees in hollows. Cluster of village houses, light stone, red pantile roofs:…arrived at the small coastal town at 11:15 a.m. in early September, her mind made up:

Such were the humble origins of The First Cut, I discover, looking back over my notebook for August 1987 to March 1988. I wrote the book in the late eighties, then, after my first four Inspector Banks novels. I remember I needed a change; a novel in which the police played a subsidiary role. Ever since reading about the Yorkshire Ripper, I’d had an idea for a story about someone who had survived a serial killer’s attack setting out for revenge.

The idea lay fallow, as these things often do, until one September day in 1987, when we crested the hill into Whitby, shortly before the above-described trip to Staithes, when the original opening revealed itself. There lay Whitby, spread out below. The colors seemed somehow brighter and more vibrant than I remembered: the greens and blues of the North Sea, the red pantile roofs. Then there was the dramatic setting of the lobster-claw harbor and the two opposing hills, one capped with a church and a ruined abbey, the other with Captain Cook’s statue and the massive jawbone of a whale. I knew immediately that this was where the story had to take place, and that it began with a woman getting off a bus, feeling a little travel-sick, trying the place on for size.

When I found out that the novel was getting another life, I toyed with the idea of rewriting it and updating it. After all, isn’t it every writer’s dream to get another chance years later at improving something one wrote in one’s early days? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just wouldn’t work, that the world has changed so much since 1987, and that the events in The First Cut couldn’t happen in a world with mobile phones, e-mail, a McDonald’s or Pizza Hut on every corner, and the current techniques of DNA testing. Genetic fingerprinting existed back then, as Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding demonstrates very well, but it was still in its infancy. Besides, I was supposed to be leaving the police behind. Given the advances in forensic science since 1987, it seemed that if I were to update the book for 2003, it would be almost impossible to keep them in the background. Whitby has changed, too, especially the footpath along the top of the cliffs which plays such an important role in the book.

In the end, I settled for correcting a few minor points, changing a character’s name, getting rid of an obtrusive comment about Margaret Thatcher. That sort of thing. In all other respects it’s the original novel, now a period piece of sorts, a slice of late-twentieth-century history, set in a time when you could smoke anywhere, get bed and breakfast for £9.50 a night and Crocodile Dundee was all the rage!