Tangled Web UK Review December 2000
Manslaughter United by
Chris Hulme
pbk out August 00
(Yellow Jersey)
at £7
This is a cross-genre book, bringing together soccer fever and prison writing. The
result is a distinctive and, to my mind, very successful book. Chris Hulme is a
journalist who visited HMP Kingston over a seven month period in the 1997-8
football season. The prison's football team, Kingston Arrows, trained on Thursdays
and played on Saturdays. The squad comprised 23 inmates - and two officers. As the
author says, 'I got to know some of them very well. Others kept their distance.' A
number of the prisoners tell their own stories. One of those which I found most
fascinating came from 'Luke', an ex-solicitor and member of the Territorial Army
who says he has 'always been a goalkeeper.' Luke married his teenage sweetheart and
seems to have pursued a yuppie lifestyle, six figure mortgage and all. 'On the morning
of the offence', as he so delicately puts it, his wife broke the news that she was
leaving him for 'a good friend'. He 'just totally lost it. I hit her with a hammer a
number of times. And she died.' Inside, Luke has taken a different path. He is a born-
again Christian and is engaged to a prison visitor. He sounds more relaxed about the
games than some of his team-mates: 'I don't mind playing in the reserves.' For some
of the other, less articulate players, football is more important, perhaps one of the few
things that keeps them sane. Chris Hulme tells their stories clearly and
unsentimentally and the football context helps to humanise the characters he
describes. As ever, where crime is concerned, the key to understanding lies in
learning, in gaining more information about the sequence of events, the family
backgrounds, the hopes and most of all the fears that go into making up the mindset of
a killer. And Chris Hulme does his bit in helping us to understand.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the Harry Delvin Mysteries)
