The Swordfish and the Star by Gavin Knight review – Cornwall’s dark, dangerous side

Hair-raising stories from the fishing ports of Cadgwith and Newlyn reveal a Cornwall very different from that known to tourists and second-home owners

Gavin Knight’s previous book, Hood Rat, was a vivid, if impressionistic, evocation of gang crime in some of Britain’s grimmest postcodes. Knight not only embedded himself in police crews working the frontline of this unofficial war, but spent hours winning the trust of gang members, and those affected by their crimes. Instead of then producing an impartial, journalistic account, he wrote something drawing on fiction techniques to speak in the voices of those he had interviewed. So where a reader might have looked for hard facts and statistics, they heard instead of a drug dealer’s concerns for managing his business, the marital crisis endured by a copper and the innermost thoughts – in the form of a monologue, in effect – of a young hitman.

The aim, clearly, was immediacy and authenticity, but some reviewers were upset by the conflict between this approach and the way the book was marketed as true crime. For his next, Knight might seem to have taken a far cosier option, immersing himself in the fishing communities of west Cornwall.

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