Order THE COPS OF MANCHESTER here
* Please, forgive me the absence of quotes from this review. There is a good reason for that, which I'll explain later this week.*
One of the tired clichés you hear in writing workshops is : ''Your setting needs to feel alive, it needs to be a character of your story.'' Like any writing advice, it's worth what it's worth. Your setting needs to feel alive only if it's important to what you're trying to say. British crime writer Col Bury is slowly but surely giving a new meaning to this piece of advice with his Manchester project. THE COPS OF MANCHESTER is the second micro-volume about the author's home town. These short story not only display the city of Manchester as a lively setting, but it's also the primary character. Such an original, off-beat project could only have seen the light of day in the ePublishing era.
I don't like to do this, but here, I'll have to talk about what I liked less at first. So please bear with me, it's all interweaved in the big picture. The stories of THE COPS OF MANCHESTER are all very short (the book clocks in at a little less than 70 pages), but some of them were written to have a strong emotional impact, yet they are too short to establish a strong link A story like FRANTIC, for example, plays on parenting instinct more than trusts it's own writing and as a reader who doesn't have kids, I thought it threw everything but the kitchen sink at me to try and get an emotional response out of me. It's a pet peeve of mine. There were maybe four of five stories like this in the collection.
But I've read Col Bury before and know what he's capable of. My favorite story of the collection EYES WIDE SHUT. I believe it's one of the longest, if not the longest story of THE COPS OF MANCHESTER and it takes a classic crime fiction trope and bends and twists it in every possible direction. It's a story that feeds on deceiving the expectations of a traditional crime fiction reader. It will make you feel like it's trying deliberately to be emotional, but it is 100% misdirection. It's also very dark. I also dug Bury's micro-fiction pieces that are barely over a few hundred words long. REMEMBER, for example, although it's trying to say a lot, achieves its goal of being unsettling as it doesn't even have the length to clutter itself. It's a tiny window into somebody else's life. Something you might have eavesdropped upon or stumbled upon at work (given the idea that this entire collection is about the police).
The unique format of Col Bury's Manchester volumes makes them an intriguing oddity in the ePublishing landscape. They are a bite-sized sample of what the talented Brit can do, yet there is enough material to make the reader feel like he's paying for a full project. THE COPS OF MANCHESTER is not long enough to sweep you away, but it's short enough to never bore you with anything. It's a fascinating love letter from Col Bury to his home town, one filled with the overflowing imagination of a dynamic and creative mind. Bury's stock is on the rise. It's a question of time before we see a novel hit the streets and when it does, hopefully he keeps writing more Manchester stories.