David Rickerby and the Poetry of Theft

 

David Rickerby is an English crime author and local celebrity living in Denmark. He published the final part of his Northern Lights Trilogy in 2015, followed later by a collection of poetry. I caught up with him to discuss his projects post Covid and plans for the future.

What are you working on?

I’m in the process of expanding the universe I created in the trilogy; improving with the lessons I learned writing it. Over lockdown, I started doing some historical crime research. I have so much now, there’s enough to turn into books. As bank heists are now a dying art, I thought I’d go back to the origins of bank robbery, starting with the crime wave which began in America after the Civil War. I’m also, working on a biography of one of the most famous criminals of that period. I hope to finish with a series of books looking at crime between then and the First World War.

And, when I say crime I mean thieves – I have no interest in gangsters or murder.

Read any good books lately?

For research: old newspapers, biographies and general history. For entertainment: pulp of the 30s-50s and nineteenth-century horror. I don’t claim to be – or wish to be the stylistic equivalent of – either Dashiell Hammett or Stoker, but I enjoy the rich, almost sickly prose of the nineteenth-century and the spartan, almost haikuesque prose of the 30s and beyond. I find them inspirational in the sense that they get my mind working in a way that modern exemplars of those genres don’t.

 

How did the Danish pandemic affect your writing?

I did Covid like jail; banged up for most of the day with a couple of hours exercise. In prison, I read books; in lockdown, I had the internet. I kept reading about how lockdown had a deleterious effect on people’s mental health – people who possess more longing for death than fear of it did fine.

It made no difference to me being abroad. I have negligible contact with the mainstream in either UK or DK. The Danes were Danish, they did as they were told. Some took it as an excuse for being assholes, but that was true of everywhere. Most people – if they didn’t like the fact that I rarely wore a mask – just looked at me passively-aggressively. But they do that anyway, so I ignored them.

 

Are you worried AI language models will take your job? Is sentience required for Scandi-Noir?

AI might as well write Scandi-Noir; it’s template writing for the most part anyway. When machines started beating chess, backgammon and Go players, it raised the standard of those games as the humans learnt from the machines. Maybe the same will happen with the arts.

 

Rickerby’s books are available on Amazon. He can be reached here.