From Graham Hurley, Angels Passing (2002):

'Faraday was watching a tiny fishing smack butting in against the tide. The harbour mouth was narrow, barely a couple of hundred yards, another rite of passage for Pompey kids. Centuries ago, a heavy iron chain had been laid across to the Gosport shore, resting on the seabed. In times of war the chain could be raised, barring entrance to the harbour, and the remains of this primitive barrier were still visible, brown and rusting, at low tide. These days, of course, there were other ways of keeping the enemy at bay but the longer Faraday spent in the city, and the deeper he plumbed its depths, the more certain he became about what made the place tick.

Portsmouth owed its very existence to aggression. Without the vigorous push to expand British influence overseas, there would never have been a navy, and without a navy, Portsmouth would still be a slightly larger version of Hayling Island, a flat, spiritless chequerboard of bungalows, smallholdings and poorly-stocked corner shops, a perfect retirement location if you'd pretty much given up on real life. As it was, though, successive wars had been the making of Pompey, giving it pride and purpose, and the only problem with the enduring post-war peace had been the vacuum it left in its wake. Hence, perhaps, the city's current reputation as a great place for a fight. Robbed of an enemy of the state, the locals had to make do by battering each other.'
(quoted with kind permission of the author).

Graham Hurley is a leading figure in the British crime-writing scene, having written over 40 excellent novels. He has also worked extensively in television in the UK and Australia as a screenwriter, producer and director, and produced a regular column for the Portsmouth News for a number of years. Perhaps his most famous literary series is the DI Faraday novels, set in Portsmouth and providing rich, highly sympathetic, but unflinching evocations of the unusual island nature of the city and its inhabitants. Hurley is powerfully influenced by locations – from his childhood experiences of Clacton-on-Sea which fostered an abiding love of grungy seaside resorts, to the flatness and huge skies of moody East Anglian landscapes; from the kibbutzim of the Golan Heights, experienced while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, to the Falkland Islands where Hurley researched and filmed a series of retrospective ITV documentaries, In Time of War, exploring aspects of the 1982 conflict; and from Kerry and Donegal to the Galician coast landscapes that inspired his WWII series The Spoils of War. Hurley’s experience of the French Touraine region have inspired another series, the third novel of which Off Script appeared in 2020.

ENTRY: Dr Mark Frost, Department of English Literature, University of Portsmouth.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email: mark.frost@port.ac.uk