The Fireworks Start at Midnight

By Laurence Watkinson

Dramatis Personae

DS Lucy Brown: A detective sergeant in the Blackpool Metropolitan Police who doesn’t yet know a hit-man has been contracted to kill her.

Brian Barnfield: A middle-aged Londoner now resident in Blackpool, currently in jail in Saudi Arabia on a charge of smuggling drugs, but who claims to be a police supergrass, who desperately needs DS Lucy Brown of the Blackpool Met to help convince the Foreign Office and thus the Saudi authorities of his innocence.

Commissioner Tristan Spratt: Blackpool’s elected Police and Crime Commissioner, who can see the potential PR advantages of being seen to help free an innocent Brit from his Saudi jail hell and his anticipated flogging or execution.

DCI Bill Ramsbottom: A down-to-earth middle-aged Lancashire detective and Lucy Brown’s boss, who doesn’t quite see the point of the Police and Crime Commissioner, and who has bigger things to worry about than PR, such as shootings that may turn out to be turf wars between the city’s criminal gangs.

Douglas ‘Dagga’ Crosland: Jamaican reggae singer and Blackpool’s pre-eminent wholesaler of cannabis, whose business empire thrives on a monopoly of cannabis sales to criminal gangs including those rooted in the town’s Iraqi, Kurdish and Turkish communities.

Osman Birdal: A young Kurdish-Blackpudlian who’s in danger of getting in with the wrong company.

Jacko Paget: A Jamaican-Blackpudlian business associate of Dagga Crosland; and a man with a dangerous secret.

Charlene Merryweather: A cousin of Dagga Crosland and girlfriend of Jacko Paget, secretly an associate (one way and/or another) of at least two other leading Blackpool gangsters.

...Together with miscellaneous police officers, criminals, sex workers and their various associates, victims etc.

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