Barry Rainsford

Barry started life as a musician before decades teaching in the most difficult and deprived areas of a major city. This provided him with a close-up of lives blighted by crime and social ills but, more importantly, insight into the lives of so many others who daily overcome circumstances that would overwhelm most of us.

For Barry, crime writing offers the opportunity to create compelling narratives that draw the audience in whilst engaging them with wider ideas beyond just the consideration of ‘cops and robbers’ or even ‘right and wrong’. The crime genre provides the possibility to consider many of the issues he feels strongly about, issues arising from his own roots in inner-city Birmingham and from his experiences.

Barry is now writing full time – having taught everyone from convicted murderers and psychopaths through to premier league footballers and Hollywood stars – and has a focus on untold stories and unheard voices.

His novel, All The Dead Men Lie sets the template.

Set in the social and political turmoil of the 1984 miner’s strike, All the Dead Men Lie tackles such themes head on. Having lived during that time in and around the Staffordshire mining communities where the novel is set, he sees these as pivotal in defining the modern world – the mistrust of police, the undermining of authority figures, the destruction of local communities and the industries that sustained them. The novel attempts to reveal a time and events that tore the social fabric of Britain and whose ills resonate down to us today.

A new work, Hollow- Who Put Bella in the Wych-Elm? – continues the theme of fiction based around actual events that explore ideas of unheard voices. The novel is based on extensive research into the archived police case files of the still unsolved discovery of a young woman’s body interred in the hollow of a tree in 1943, an event that for more than eighty years has been the subject of myth and legend. Taking the events and characters involved, the novel is a gripping historical crime-thriller.

Barry is busy editing and completing new works, among these a series of darkly comic crime novels set in North Yorkshire, the first of which is due summer 2025