Anger turned David Nolan into a crime fiction author.
Everything was too much, and storming around the house in a huff wasn’t helping. He needed to get it out.
One day, he sat down at his laptop and let his white-hot rage spray over the screen like a scalding shower.
Fury guided his fingertips as they crashed across keyboard; every word its own powerful release of emotion.
But when he finally stopped typing, David realised something. He had a story in front of him.
Of course, there was a very real reason why he was so angry in the first instance.
David had been spending every waking hour researching a fact-based book about the scale and breadth of abuse in Britain – as well the connection to media, politics and power.
It was a topic that had cast a long shadow over his life.
David was one of many abused at St Ambrose school in Altrincham during the seventies – with teacher Alan Morris found guilty of 19 sex assaults carried out against 10 boys.
After initially going to the police, David decided to withdraw his evidence to report on the case in his capacity as a journalist.
David Nolan has become the chief architect of Manc Noir fiction
As an investigation peeled back the layers, it became clear that the abuse involved numerous individuals and spanned decades – becoming the biggest of its kind Greater Manchester Police had ever seen.
David braved a journey into his troubling past to interview fellow victims, families, detectives involved in the case; building a huge amount of material that included a book (Tell The Truth And Shame The Devil) and a documentary for Radio 4 (The Abuse Trial).
And it isn’t over, either. Almost 40 years on, victims are still coming forward.
“Ex-pupils still talk to me about it now,” says David.
“I’m still getting calls and emails from them even today – because they want someone to talk to about what happened to them.”
David’s work on the St Ambrose case led to him being commissioned for a huge project – all-encompassing book titled Abuse of Power that would reach further and delve deeper into abuse cases and their connections to the wider world.
But suddenly he was ordered to stop.
“‘Actually, here’s some money to piss off and not write it,’” David paraphrases his would-be publishers, who’d apparently had an abrupt change of heart.
With that, Abuse of Power was shelved.
Embittered and incensed at the injustice of it all, David decided to channel the anger into his writing.
What came out was Black Moss – David’s debut novel.
The dark, frightening pages were marketed as fiction. But in reality, much of it was fact.
The Mermaid’s Pool follows David’s debut fiction book Black Moss
“With Black Moss, I realised I could say all the things I wanted to say, but just pretend it’s a rip-roaring crime thriller,” David explains.
“It was a way for me to let out my anger and tell a story based on truth.”
This was a big change for David – who’d previously regarded fiction writing to be “cheating.”
He’d spent his entire working life as a reporter, after all – where he’d been taught to focus on facts and tell things as they were.
His career had been a thrilling one, too; with David’s rise up the ladder coinciding with the moment that Manchester was fast becoming centre of the world.
Everything was happening here between the eighties and nineties: The Strangeways Riots; Madchester; The IRA Bomb; Mosside gang fights.
In David’s words, it was a “ridiculous” time to be a journalist, and his colourful experiences on the beat – and chapters of his dark past – have found their way into works of fiction he never could have imagined himself writing when he was a fledgling reporter in Altrincham.
But today, he is flying the flag for a brand new local crime genre: Manc Noir.
Black Moss was perhaps the first ever book to be given the Manc Noir label; telling the story of a young boy killed by the eponymous reservoir in Saddleworth whilst everyone else was distracted by the inmates on the roof of Strangeways Prison.
The novel received rave reviews – and it convinced David to write another story in the same universe.
It already had a concept; titled The Mermaid’s Pool after the peculiar moor-top body of water hidden in the shadow of Kinder Scout.
But to get The Mermaid’s Pool out onto the page, David had to remember what had turned him into an author in the first instance.
“With Black Moss, I didn’t set out to write a novel – it was an accident,” David explains.
“This time, with TheMermaid’s Pool, it was intentional. But I had to think: ‘How did I do it last time?’
“I remembered it was because I was angry. So, I thought: ‘What am I angry about, right now?’”
“I was angry at the rise of the far-right; the murder of Jo Cox, and the guy who planned machete attack on another MP.
“I was angry about my wife having breast cancer – sat in the Christie (hospital) feeling like a spare part and wanting to say to the doctors ‘take it from her and give it to me’.
“I was angry about the Moors being on fire because of some divvy with a portable BBQ.”
It all served as inspiration. Machete-wielding neo-nazis, heartbreaking tragedy, ferocious blazes. Everything that stirred rage in David made it into the book.
“Some people like to have a few drinks before they write, others like to go for a run.
“For me, it’s getting angry.”
David’s novel lends its title from the body of water on Kinder Scout / Wikimedia Commons
Emotion got the text flowing, but again, much of The Mermaid’s Pool is rooted in reality.
The novel’s ‘thank you’ list reads like a who’s-who of anyone and everyone in Greater Manchester – from ex-detectives and the fire brigade to ecstasy-takers and councillors.
David even contacted Kinder Mountain Rescue Team to discuss the logistics of manoeuvring a dead body from the moorland.
They helped him out, too – realising he was a meticulous author rather than a murderer.
But as real as the book feels, there’s also some myth in there.
“The Mermaid’s Pool itself has a legend around it – which says there’s a mermaid that lives within it,” David explains.
“Apparently, if you climb up on Easter eve, you can call out to her.
“If she likes you, she’ll give you eternal life. If she doesn’t, she’ll drag you down and drown you.”
David said he’s never had to look too far from home for this kind of inspiration.
Manchester might have been depicted in predictable ways on television in the recent past, but David says there’s far more in its makeup than many might have recognised.
A closer look reveals that Manchester has the ideal balance of pure beauty and unsettling strangeness to function as an optimum canvas for crime fiction.
“Manchester is so much more than Cold Feet or Shameless,” David declares.
“It’s a city, it’s canals, it’s posh, it’s poor, it’s multicultural, it’s Catholic, it’s Irish, it’s Jewish.
“Then you’ve got the hills all around; bleak and windy and horrible. It’s a landscape that’s amazing, foreboding and frightening all at the same time.
David pauses for a second and lets out an incredulous gasp.
“Honestly… why would you want to write about anywhere else?!”
The Mermaid’s Pool is out now. The book is available to order here.
Feature
Five Manchester artists we’ve been listening to this month | June 2025
Danny Jones
Hello there. That greeting may be giving Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars vibes, and we can’t lie, we have listened to some cantina music while working this month… but not as much as we’ve been immersing ourselves in more new Manchester artists.
You should know the drill by now, and it is very much a what-it-says-on-the-tin scenario, but every few weeks, we round up some of the music – all crucially hailing from the Greater Manchester area – that we’ve been listening to of late.
We don’t discriminate when it comes to genre either. There’s only one simple rule: if it’s good, then we listen to it and then, hopefully, so do you.
Get your playlists at the ready.
Five Manc music artists we’ve been listening to recently
1. Arkayla
First up for June are relative newcomers Arkayla, whose name is inspired by “a terrible Oasis demo” from 1991 (their words, not ours – thought it is…) of the same name, a.k.a. ‘I Will Show You’, in which describe Liam Gallagher’s now legendary as once sounding “like a dodgy Ian Brown impressionist.”
However, there’s nothing dodgy about these lot and, thankfully, they’re in an era when you don’t have to hand out tapes recorded in the Boardwalk basement on the street to be heard. The Manchester band, which only formed in 2020, may be Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, but they’ve already got a sound.
There’s an unmistakable British indie element to them and hints at everything from The Kooks to The Lathums, but most notably, there are ’60s guitar notes and some real maturity already. Standouts include ‘Ella Malone’, the acoustic version of ‘Lost In a Valentine’, where the lead singer, Cal Blakebrough, really shines, and ‘Rita’ is such an addictive track.
They don’t get more unknown, undiscovered, but sure to be up-and-coming than iNNAFIELD, who are a female-fronted psychedelia-forward five-piece with roots in Brighton but building a career in 0161. Having recently shone at The Deaf Institute playing a support slot at Academy 1, they have our interest.
If a glimpse of lead singer Jessie Amy Leask’s curly hair, 70s belts and long, flowing skirts plants Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac in your mind, you’d be right in thinking so; a listen to their other live tracks scattered across their socials confirms there’s plenty of other influences going on too, though.
Now, they’ve only got one proper recording out on Spotify called ‘Tell Me What’s On Your Mind’, but we’ve had it popping up on our algorithms everywhere, and we can see why: there’s soft, twinkly strumming, soft almost sleepy vocals before a nice big breakout at the end. Glorious stuff.
No, not that one, the Princess of Monaco isn’t back from the dead, but ‘r Grace Kelly, who is based right here in Greater Manchester, is playing her part in the ongoing country revival taking place across the music world, offering her soulful voice and faux American-folk vibes to our ears.
She may not be a Mancunian by birth, having moved from New Zealand to our shores back in 2022, and although the weather change might have been a big sea change for her, there’s no culture shock to be found in her style; from the audio to the aesthetic, it still somehow feels pretty authentic.
Uplifting acoustic guitars, drum brush strokes, solos, Southern-twang harmonies – you name it, all the ingredients are there. The thing is, if you spend enough time immersing yourself in a genre, you can still pull off tracks like ‘Carry On’, ‘San Jose’ and the intimate ‘For Us To Change’.
We’re really lane switching when it comes to genre this month; maybe it’s because festival season is in full swing and we’re just being exposed to so much different stuff in a short space of time, all we know is we’re not complaining about it.
And neither should you, especially when you’ve got names like hip-hop, grime, soul and flag-flying Afrobeats rising star, Prido, being platformed. Blending all the above with R’n’B and a sprinkling of not just Northern but easily detectable Manc slant, it makes his music stand out in the ever-thriving space.
‘Free Ur Mind’ was the first track we ever heard, so we’ve struggled to shake that as our favourite, but ‘DND’ is a supremely dancey but chill example of laid-back of the genre that you need in your mixes this summer, and we also have a soft spot for his verse on the sensual ‘Lifeboat’ by Prima.
Last but not least on our list of new Manchester artists for this June, we’ve got local DJ Josh Baker, whose name you might recognise from the headlines surrounding Parklife 2025, as his set was unfortunately cancelled due to problems out of his control.
Festival-goers flocked to The Matinee Stage for a highly anticipated back-to-back bill of Baker followed by Dutch counterpart Chris Stussy, both of whom have thrilled some of the biggest club crowds in the country – sadly, he didn’t get to do so this time. That being said, we thought we’d give him a shout-out.
We’ll confess to only having got around to his discography following this news, but ‘Back It Up’, ‘Something To Me’, and ‘You Don’t Own Me’ with Prospa and RAHH are all bangers. We’re looking forward to listening to more.
And that should just about do you; there are five artists and, at the very least, 15 new tracks for you to give a go – there should be at least of few of them you like.
But, let’s be honest: be it unheard, new, current, old or anything in between, Manchester music very rarely ends up being filed in the skippable category.
Then again, you can always check out last month’s list of Manc artists from last month and see if you get a better hit ratio.
Featured Images — Prido (via Facebook)/Arkayla (via X)/Grace Kelly (via Facebook)
Feature
You can sleep in a luxury train carriage at an old railway station in Greater Manchester
Thomas Melia
There’s an Airbnb listing in Delph where you can stay in a classic converted train carriage, and it’s even situated in an old train station, so someone buy my ticket ASAP.
Get ready to have the best train experience of your life, as the only cancellation you have to worry about is booking the day off work.
The Carriage at The Old Station is a two-person character property in Delph, Saddleworth that offers you the chance to live out your vintage fantasy by stepping back in time on a luxury static train coach.
It may be situated at an old station, but the interior is refreshing and light with mint blue beams, fuchsia cushions and a royal red carpet and curtains.
As well as a majestic interior, this carriage has an equally impressive amount of amenities, including a Bluetooth sound system, board games and its own indoor fireplace.
This Airbnb is fairly new too, with only 44 reviews to its name – the first only dating back to September of last year; don’t say we don’t find you some absolute gems.
Inside the Airbnb that’s an old converted train carriage.The interior of this Airbnb listing is bold and impressive.
One user even stated, “We regularly stay in five-star locations and this surpassed five-star easily! We highly recommend a stay here.”
While another opened her review with three simple adjectives that we also feel perfectly sum up this train carriage property perfectly: “Opulent, indulgent, extravagant”.
It should come as no surprise that this place is beautiful inside and out, as in the description, host of the property Nigel states he’s a retired designer.
The train carriage stay is also close to a proper country pub, The Old Bell Inn, as well as the Diggle canal walk if you fancy a stroll and a pint before tucking into bed in your old train carriage for the night.
Even the bathroom has pops of colour throughout.You could stay in this train carriage at an old train station.
If you’re after boarding The Carriage at The Old Station and having a fabulous overnight stay or mini holiday of your own, you can find the Airbnb listing and everything you need to know HERE.
The Manc -
3rd November 2020 
