Moseley and the Gay Village – The Real Birmingham Behind Deadly Desires
Moseley, a bohemian suburb of Birmingham, and Birmingham's gay village in the city centre are the settings for Deadly Desires, book 3 in my Detective Zoe Finch series. Some books are built on places I've only researched. Deadly Desires is built on places I've lived.
Let me take you to two corners of Birmingham I know in my bones, and tell you why they were the only possible setting for this story.
What is Moseley like?
After I graduated, I lived in Moseley for a couple of years.
Moseley is the sort of place a lot of people land for a chapter of their lives rather than for good. It's eye-wateringly expensive to buy in, so it runs heavily on rental, which gives it a constant churn of students, graduates, artists and musicians passing through. I was one of them – fresh out of university, finding my feet, living somewhere that felt more interesting and more alive than anywhere I'd been before.
That gives it a particular character. It's bohemian, a bit arty, gloriously mixed. You'll see someone walking out of a multi-million-pound house pass someone who's barely a step from homelessness, and someone who is homeless, and they all rub along together on the same streets. There's a tolerance to it, an easy diversity, that I've always loved.
It also has a significant gay community, which is one of the reasons I set one of the couples in Deadly Desires there. It felt true to the place. When I write Moseley, I'm not inventing an atmosphere – I'm remembering one.
That transient, anything-goes quality is part of what makes it such fertile ground for a story. People come and go. Nobody quite knows everybody. And in a crime novel, that's exactly the kind of place where someone can hide in plain sight.
Birmingham's gay village
The other heart of this book is Birmingham's gay village, in the city centre.
The case at the heart of Deadly Desires strikes at the city's gay community, so it was almost inevitable that the story would centre on the village. It's where the community is most visible, most concentrated, most itself. And one of the things I most wanted to get right was the way a community responds when it feels under threat.
Because that's what happens in the book. As fear spreads, people draw together. The village becomes a focal point – not just a place where bad things happen, but a place where a frightened community gathers, looks after its own, and refuses to be cowed. Birmingham's queer community is spread right across the city, of course, the way any community is. But in a moment of danger, the village is where it draws its lines and stands its ground. I found that genuinely moving to write.
Are the bars in Deadly Desires real?
No, and that's deliberate. The bars, pubs and venues in the book are invented. They're based on real places in the gay village – I drew on the feel of them, the layout, the warmth and the buzz – but I made them up.
The reason is simple: some genuinely nasty things happen in this story, and I don't want to attach them to real establishments that real people run and love. A fictional bar can host a tragedy. A real one shouldn't have to.
So when you read Deadly Desires, you're getting the true texture of Birmingham's gay village – the community, the energy, the sense of belonging – wrapped around venues that exist only on the page. That's a balance I'm always trying to strike: a city that's unmistakably real, peopled by places that are safely fictional.
When is Deadly Desires set?
It's set just before Christmas, and that timing matters. There's something especially chilling about fear stalking a community during the season when everyone's supposed to feel safe and warm and surrounded by people they love. The lights are up, the bars are full, the city's at its most festive – and a killer is moving through it. That contrast gives Deadly Desires a particular cold edge.
What I hope you take from this one is the love I have for these parts of Birmingham. Moseley, with its glorious mess of people. The gay village, with its fierce sense of community. They're real, they're vivid, and they deserved a story that treated them with respect.
Real locations in Deadly Desires
Moseley
Birmingham's gay village
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New to the series? Start with Deadly Wishes, or get the prequel novella Deadly Origins free.
