The Caveman and the Generic North

I was recently listening to the audiobook of Elly Griffiths’ The Crossing Places. It was recommended to me specifically for its use of the competency kink trope, driven by the fact that the protagonist, Ruth Galloway, is a brilliant forensic archaeologist. It is a masterclass in atmospheric crime fiction and a genuinely gripping novel. Griffiths, whose real name is Domenica de Rosa, is a phenomenal talent who was born in London and resides near Brighton. Her Southern roots perhaps explain a slight geographical blind spot when it comes to writing the North. The narrative pairs our highly educated academic protagonist with a police detective named DCI Harry Nelson. Nelson is ostensibly a Lancashire man hailing from Blackpool. Yet, his dialogue and dialect often read as a generic, homogenised caricature of a Yorkshireman. You will find a good deal more detail on the use of the Northern dialect in fiction in my parallel blog post on the use and abuse of social class and region.

To understand why this happens, we must look at the mechanics of storytelling. In literature, a foil is a character specifically designed to contrast with another character. The entire purpose of a foil is to highlight particular qualities or traits of the protagonist by providing a stark opposing background. In this novel, Nelson is the structural foil to Ruth Galloway, and their dynamic relies heavily on that exact competency kink I was promised.

Ruth is afforded a deeply intellectual, highly specific competency. She understands bone forensics, carbon dating, and historical nuance. Because she is granted this deep intellectual respect, the narrative requires a foil who operates on pure, unrefined instinct. Nelson’s policing competency is not treated as an academic or intellectual skill. It is presented as a blunt instrument. He is written as the archetypal Northern caveman, and his flattened, generic dialect is used as a shorthand for a lack of academic refinement. He exists structurally to make the archaeologist look even smarter by contrast. It is an incredibly effective shorthand for traditional publishing, but to a local reader, this blending of the North is a glaring error.

The North is not a monolith, and Lancashire itself is deeply divided linguistically. I grew up spending a great deal of time with my mother’s auntie and uncle, who served as de facto grandparents to me. She lived over the Pennines in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Because of that upbringing, my ear is finely tuned to the cadences of that specific region. When I listen to Harry Nelson, his vocabulary sounds to both my linguistic ear and my emotional ear exactly like the East Lancashire and West Yorkshire borders.

The text explicitly has Nelson using phrases like 'that were champion' ('that was terrrific') and 'any road' ('anyway'). The narrative might give him a Seasiders tattoo to anchor him physically to Blackpool Football Club, but his vocabulary betrays him. East Lancashire towns like Burnley, Blackburn, Colne, and Accrington share a border and hundreds of years of industrial history with Yorkshire. Dialects do not respect county lines, creating what linguists call a dialect continuum across the Pennines. Because those specific phrases are heavily used in Yorkshire, they naturally bleed straight over the hills into East Lancashire.

Conversely, West Lancashire towns such as Ormskirk, Burscough, and Skelmersdale sit on the coastal plain bordering Merseyside. Skelmersdale, in particular, was a designated New Town in the 1960s and took in a massive population overflow from Liverpool. Because of that geography, West Lancashire slang has been heavily influenced by Scouse over the last sixty years. In West Lancs, you are much more likely to hear something described as boss or sound rather than champion.

Therefore, if you hear a character say that it is cracking flags out there and they are champion any road, you are almost certainly dealing with an East Lancastrian or a Yorkshireman in disguise. You are certainly not dealing with a detective from the Fylde coast. Someone from Blackpool has a distinct maritime and working class linguistic heritage that simply does not sound like a mill worker from Bradford or Wakefield. When writers treat the North as a single entity, they unintentionally commodify regional identity and replace rich sociolinguistic reality with a theatrical costume.

OSW