Poet in the Gutter: Remembering John Baker and 1990s York
Back in the early 2000s when I started blogging for the first time, one of the bloggers I regularly read was the crime writer, John Baker.
Like me at the time, John lived in York, and in his blog, he often detailed his life in the city. There were shared points of reference in local theatre shows, films, and exhibitions. He visited and commented on my blog, and occasionally left words of encouragement about my writing.He had a life that was rich in music, art, and film, and this was evident in his writing.
His blog is no longer available, but it was until fairly recently. Likewise, his Twitter/X account but neither had been updated for over a decade.
At the time I encountered John, he was in his early 60s, so if he's still around he'll be in his 80s. The last book he published was in 2009, having been fairly prolific since the mid-90s.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, John had a varied range of occupations, including in the wholefood business, wine and spirits, the computer industry, as an aircraft industry operative, and as a milkman. Having been born in Hull, he spent time with his family in the south of France and Oslo before settling in York. It's not uncommon for writers who begin publishing in their middle-aged or older years to amass a similar number of career hats before finally getting to where they were always likely to end up.
John's main output was the Sam Turner novels. Sam was a private detective based in an office in St Helen's Square, a stone's throw from Betty's Tea Room.
He was surrounded by a likeable cast of characters, including a former homeless young man whom he helps to rehabilitate, various love interests, and a formidable retired spinster who becomes his office manager. The novels were reasonably popular at the time, but were perhaps slightly overlooked compared to the edgier, more graphic police procedurals and forensic style novels that dominated the crime fiction sales charts.
Sam is clearly in the tradition of the Raymond Chandler private investigator stories, but there's a greater humanity in the novels. Sam is a deeply flawed person, but incredibly loyal to his friends. The novelist Ann Cleves described John's work as being "about kindness." Sam is self-consciously trying to be the tough Sam Spade-style PI, and can handle himself in tight situations, but there's a vulnerability and humanity that makes him more interesting than the average hard-boiled sleuth.
John's influences stretch way beyond the crime genre, and that's evident in the writing, which is rich with allusions to other authors.
John said of his own writing:
"I am driven to write novel-length fiction. I write heavily themed novels, do not consider plot important, and am primarily interested in identity and politics. My main influences are Mark Twain, Hemingway, Hammett, and Faulkner. I write with no preconceptions other than a vague idea of theme."
One thing that's really interesting about the books for me is that they capture the York of the period. It was a city on the point of transition, with its strong railway and manufacturing traditions being gradually lost. At the time, the city still felt like a working place that balanced tourism with its other industries and its role as a university town. It still had the feel of a county town at times.
During the period John was writing the novels, the manufacturing decline gathered pace, the universities grew, and tourism numbers increased exponentially. When I first arrived in the city in 1995, tourists were relatively few in number between the New Year and Easter and the city breathed a little sigh of relief before gathering itself for the summer.
That changed in the subsequent years, and when we left in 2019, it was reaching overtourism proportions, something fueled by Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Friends who still live there say it's got even worse, with much of the city centre now feeling like a theme park. It's a common story in this age of cheap travel and constant online overexposure.
When I came to re-read the Sam Turner books again, I felt a great deal of nostalgia for the city I knew (as well as my own young adulthood). John captures a city with deep divides of wealth and background, and how those fissures appeared to be growing.
I had to re-purchase a couple of the novels as I had lost two of the series along the way. One of those was the first in the series, "Poet In The Gutter", set in 1995, Sam Turner accidentally finds himself working as a detective when he tells his Men's Group that he's a private eye rather than an unemployed alcoholic.
I bought a second-hand copy online, and when it arrived, I was pleased to discover it was signed by John.
It felt good to renew a connection with a writer who has influenced me and was a source of encouragement to my younger self, as well as to revisit a fictional rendering of a place and time I knew so well.