University of Birmingham – The Real Campus Behind Deadly Reprisal
The University of Birmingham, with its grand red-brick buildings and famous clock tower, and the student neighbourhoods around it in Edgbaston and Selly Oak, are the setting for Deadly Reprisal, book 5 in my Detective Zoe Finch series. Of all my Birmingham settings, this might be the most personal. Let me tell you why.
The university I grew up next to
I went to school very close to the University of Birmingham. So close that my route to school took me straight through the campus, almost every day. And I loved it. There's something wonderful about walking through a university as a child – the grand red-brick buildings, the famous clock tower, the sense of a whole world of ideas going on around you that you're not quite part of yet.
By the time I was in the sixth form and didn't have to wear school uniform any more, my friends and I got bolder. We'd wander over to the students' union and hang about, pretending to be students ourselves. We must have stuck out like sore thumbs. I'm fairly sure no actual undergraduate was fooled for a second. But it felt thrillingly grown-up at the time.
So it's a place that runs right through my life. It's a genuinely beautiful campus, and getting to write about it was a real pleasure, even with such a dark story unfolding across it.
Selly Oak and Edgbaston
Around the university sit the neighbourhoods that any Birmingham student knows: Edgbaston, leafy and grand, and Selly Oak, the classic student land where everyone who isn't in halls ends up living, in shared houses with too many people and not enough heating.
I know Selly Oak well – I spent a lot of my school years in and around it. So when Deadly Reprisal moves through these streets, I'm writing from memory, not from a map.
Zoe knows it well too. She lives in Selly Oak, in one of the few family homes on a street mainly populated by students. And Zoe loves it that way. She loves living surrounded by students. She loves drinking in the pubs they frequent (pubs I drank in too when I was younger). And she loves being a proxy mum to some of them.
How does Deadly Reprisal begin?
In book 5, I wanted to pull the focus inwards. Instead of opening with a crime that affects the whole city, the book opens with something on a much smaller scale: one student finding another student dead.
Universities can be very intense environments. They're a community of their own, but one in which people are going through some important and sometimes difficult experiences. For students it might be their first time away from home, and certainly the first time living with people who aren't their family.
When I was at university, I spent all three years in a hall of residence. There were just 150 students in my building, along with perhaps a dozen staff, and we all got to know each other – sometimes more intimately than we'd like to. If you made solid friendships, then it was wonderful. But if you were bullied, or you had a bust-up with someone, then it could be hell.
And I kept going back to memories of student parties and the way they could act as a flashpoint. Everybody's in one place, a lot of people are drunk, and emotions are running high. So I decided to open the book with a party. It's dark, it's late, and there's confusion. Is the body really a body, or just someone who's drunk too much?
Is the hall of residence in Deadly Reprisal real?
No. The hall of residence at the centre of Deadly Reprisal isn't a real University of Birmingham hall, and there are two reasons for that.
The first is my usual rule: I don't set murders in real, specific places where real people live and work. A whole hall full of students did not need me hanging a killing on their actual front door.
The second reason is more unusual, and it's down to timing. I planned this book during lockdown. I'd intended to immerse myself properly – to book a couple of nights in the modern hotel right there on the Birmingham campus, soak up the atmosphere, and walk all my locations. But lockdown closed the hotel, and stopped me even travelling across the city to check the places I wanted to use.
So I did what writers do. I improvised. The hall of residence in Deadly Reprisal is based not on Birmingham at all, but on my own hall of residence from my student days – Willoughby Hall at Nottingham University. I knew it inside out, because I'd lived there. So that's the building you're really walking through in this book: my memories of Nottingham, wearing a Birmingham disguise.
There's something rather lovely, in hindsight, about a book so rooted in place being built partly out of memory and imagination rather than fresh research. Lockdown forced me back on the things I already carried: a childhood spent walking through that campus, a teenager's afternoons in Selly Oak, three years of student life in a hall in another city. It turns out that a lifetime of knowing places is its own kind of research, and sometimes the version you remember is truer than the version you'd have photographed. Deadly Reprisal is stitched together from all of that, and I think it's the warmer for it.
Real locations in Deadly Reprisal
The University of Birmingham campus
Selly Oak
Edgbaston
Read more
University of Birmingham – Detective Zoe Finch Series Location Guide
New to the series? Start with Deadly Wishes, or get the prequel novella Deadly Origins free.
