The Venetian Vase

I grew up in Blacon, Chester. Blacon has a reputation for being one of the roughest areas in Chester, which will strike some of my British readers as a contradiction in terms. Chester is a beautiful historic city in the north-west of England, famous for its Roman Walls and Tudor Rows. It’s a scenic and relaxing place to explore on foot. Retired LAPD detective Rick Jackson once told me he visited Chester after a particularly traumatic homicide case. He needed somewhere peaceful to unwind, as far away from Los Angeles as possible. Chester has always been a great place to visit.

Nevertheless, Chester does have it rougher areas and Blacon is one of them. When I was a child, the rumour was that Blacon was the largest council estate in Europe. I don’t know how much truth there was in that. Since the early 1980s, council housing has steadily been sold off in Britain. Blacon itself is an architectural hotchpotch with old army housing standing alongside high rise flats. My parents enrolled me at the Bishop’s Blue Coat Church of England High School in Boughton. My older siblings had gone to Blacon High School, but my mum and dad felt that I would be better served in a school out of town. It was at high school that I began to realise how different my upbringing was from a lot of the other pupils. They hailed from the wealthier areas of Chester such as Upton and Handbridge, and for them Blacon was a dirty word at best, an aberration at worst.

One day when I was sixteen, I witnessed something that brought home just how ‘other’ Blacon was to the rest of Chester.

My friend Neil had a weekend job refereeing football matches. One morning, I went to watch Neil referee in Clifton Drive, which was at the bottom of a small hill directly below my family home. I went along to the game with another friend, Siddy. There was a clearing near the football field where cars would park and the drivers would engage in drugs, dogging and God knows what else. The clearing was empty when we arrived, moments before the match started. By half-time, Siddy and I were bored so we left. As we departed we noticed there was a car parked in the clearing. It had not been there when we arrived. The passenger door was ajar. Something from inside the car was holding the passenger door open. Siddy and I looked at each other quizzically. Something wasn’t right here, we told each other silently.

We approached the car and saw that it was a lifeless body holding the door open. The driver’s side was empty. From memory, the car had a nardo grey paint coating but it may have been a cheaper knock-off. The dashboard was littered with powder, a burnt-spoon, a plastic bag and various other items of drug paraphernalia. The passenger had overdosed and tried to exit the car as he was dying. He died half-in, half-out of the car. The driver had fled in panic, leaving behind a corpse in his car. It had all happened in the first half of the football match, while we were watching Neil referee the game. A crowd began to gather. Siddy and I were doped up to our gills on pot, my vice at the time, and we didn’t want to hang around for the police, so we left. 

We never heard anything else about the corpse in the nardo grey car.

Postscript: I’ve shared this story from my past as it is the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, and it felt appropriate for a crime-oriented website to share a True Crime story of my own.

One of the reasons I am grateful for this blog is for the opportunity to promote my work to an international audience. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy received excellent publicity in the UK, with great reviews in all of the leading newspapers. But it barely received any coverage in the US, even after it won the Edgar Award for Best Biography. So without this website, many readers in the States, including Ellroy fans, would not have heard of the book.

Thanks for reading and here’s to the next sixteen years.