Land of plenty

ANDREW Martin's first novel, Bilton, was a genuinely funny satire on the posey London media set and their lifestyle journalism. It immediately established him, in the words of one critic, as "one of the best comic writers of his generation".

So, when it came to that legendarily difficult second book, Martin decided to do something different. Very different.

This move was partly prompted by a reader. "I did a reading from Bilton once," he said. "Somebody stood up and said, 'I enjoyed the book but is it a proper novel? It's about journalism, and you are a journalist'.

"I pointed out that Bilton culminated in the outbreak of the Third World War and I hadn't experienced that. But I took his point."

Martin, a columnist for the New Statesman and freelance contributor to the Independent and Daily Telegraph, decided to look away from London and Fleet Street for new inspiration. And that took him to his childhood home: York.

"I spent 20 years there, and still come back regularly. It's in my head and in my dreams. You have got to use what you have got."

The result is The Bobby Dazzlers, published this month. A small-time York crook, emotionally scarred by the deaths of both his mother and his best childhood friend, is fresh out of a young offenders' institution.

In urgent need of £20,000 to pay off a hitman, he agrees to steal some valuable chairs from Mr Ollerenshaw's House, a folk museum on the North York Moors. To do this, he teams up with three other hapless criminals with darkly comic, and ultimate tragic, consequences.

The Bobby Dazzlers is almost diametrically opposed to Bilton, being set in the gritty Northern underworld rather than in the ostentatious society of London's elite. There is a link, however: the media.

This comes in the persona of Bryan Butteridge, the professional Yorkshireman whose TV shows and coffee table books extol the delights of God's Own County.

Butteridge is a wonderful parody that some of Britain's most prominent Yorkshireman may find a touch too close for comfort.

Where did he come from? "I would come across certain kinds of professional middle class northerners in London. I'd find that, after a couple of drinks, they would lapse into a sort of parody of a Yorkshire accent," Martin says.

"Butteridge was not meant to be entirely contemptible. I rather like that character. I've sympathy for him.

"He's also been left behind by history. There's a new type of Yorkshire emerging. There's a new self-confidence, like the club culture in Leeds.

"Butteridge can no longer file his articles by fax. He's got to send them by email."

Also, his interviewees are "ordinary people who are supposedly characters." Martin mourns the passing of this sort of journalism. "I always used to listen to Down Your Way for the characters it would throw up."

Mind you, the author's sympathy for Butteridge may be influenced by a degree of self-recognition. "I began drinking only in pubs where I knew I could get good real ale," Martin admits. "I thought, 'I'm turning into a professional Yorkshireman'."

The former Ashfield and Nunthorpe Grammar School pupil was keen to look beyond the chocolate box view of North Yorkshire. Episodes set in Whitby and the Moors fulfilled his ambition to write "scenes of unpleasantness set in sites of outstanding natural beauty".

As for the city, he believes "there are two sides to York. There's quite a tough, Labour-voting town, with more than its fair share of pubs full of lads, where I was for a very long time.

"The other side, that's the rather self-satisfied side to York. I wanted to have the two sides meeting head on."

They clash most entertainingly when the inflated Butteridge and the unpitying gang come head to head. The conflict should be no surprise: Martin's New Statesman column is all about the class divide.

"I don't buy this hype about it having ended. Ask yourself a question: have you ever seen a middle class person with a tattoo?"

Another of Martin's interests is trains: they haunt The Bobby Dazzlers and he used to write a newspaper column about the London Underground. He hopes his next book, set on the Edwardian railway, will help his quest to "make trains more mainstream".

Meanwhile, he is waiting for the response to The Bobby Dazzlers, particularly from York readers. "I hope they won't think 'it's some London tosser slagging off our town'. I spent a long time in York and still come up every couple of months. I like York.

"One of the motivations for the book is 'trouble in paradise'. It's to purge my seeing York as a perfect place."

His attempts to persuade his wife to leave London and move back up here have failed. So he'll have to make do with frequent sorties to York. "There are certain things I like which, as long as they stay, I'll be happy," he says. "The Black Swan, the Blue Bell, a couple of bookshops in Micklegate and the Minster."

- The Bobby Dazzlers by Andrew Martin is published by Faber and Faber price £9.99.