Northern noir finds a new detective hero in the dark heart of Yorkshire

Streets of Darkness is being compared to The Wire for its gritty take on Bradford. Writer AA Dhand tells how the city’s race riots in 2001 helped him create Sikh investigator Harry Virdee

We’ve walked the mean streets of Hebden Bridge in Happy Valley and been gripped by Red Riding, David Peace’s hallucinatory take on the Yorkshire Ripper. Now a new crime series is set to put Bradford’s satanic mills in the spotlight.

Streets of Darkness, by AA Dhand, follows suspended police detective Harry Virdee as he tries to solve a murder within 24 hours in a city riven with tensions and on the verge of a race riot as bad as those that took place there in 2001. The result is a tense slice of neo-noir that has won Dhand comparisons to both BBC drama Luther and HBO’s The Wire. Television rights were sold before the book’s publication in June, with FilmWave, the producer behind the recent adaptation of JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, working with Dhand on a series.

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