The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers’s new novel is about the Yorkshire poor in the 18th century, a time when the theft of a handkerchief or a loaf of bread could lead to the gallows. Small wonder, then, that smuggling and coining – the manufacture of fake money from melted-down clippings – was rife, and that the gangs were protected by local populations.

Today the Cragg Vale Coiners and their chief, David Hartley, who ran a successful coining business and protection racket from his moorland home in the 1760s, are commemorated in a Calderdale museum. Myers’s retelling of their desperate rise and fall is interspersed with the fictional prison journal of “the greyt King Dayvid Hartee A farther a husban a leeder a forger a moorman of the hills and a pote [poet] of werds and deeds”.

Review by Carol Birch @ the Guardian and more here @ Blue Moose Books