Attica Locke in Conversation at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
By Sarah Morgan, July 2025
What is the perfect way to kick off a festival of any kind?
With a great guest, of course. Thankfully, the organisers of this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at the Old Swan in Harrogate secured that by having Attica Locke as its opening speaker.
It may only have been 9am, but she was on top form, with mentions of the menopause (she’s going through it at the moment, which necessitated the use of an electric fan), Donald Trump (it’s fair to say she’s not keen on him) and the F-bomb, which was dropped several times and will no doubt have woken up any sleepy attendees.
But the main thrust of the occasion was, of course, her work as a writer, although we did get some tidbits about her early years too, including the revelation that she was named after a riot that took place in a jail in Upstate New York in 1971, during which the inmates protested against their inhumane conditions, until the authorities reacted with violence.
“I was born three years later and Attica was the name that came to them,” says Locke of her parents. “I came into the world with a political eye, and my mom wanted me to know the power of ‘no’.”
Nevertheless, she claims she was “a kid of the 1980s. I was watching cartoons, The Cosby Show… I had a normal Black middle class upbringing, but I could feel the history; in my background there were unpublished writers and poets. And I eventually found I could sit in a room with a pen and create…”
Initially, however, Locke wanted to be a movie director, an ambition that resulted in her studying at the Sundance Institute. Sadly, the disappointment of a failed film deal prompted her to become a screenwriter-for-hire, but she walked away from that too when nothing she wrote was produced.
“We only have so much time, and you have to use it,” she says with a philosophical smile. “I thought I’d given up Hollywood for good.”
“Anybody who’s on the margins is a vital voice”
But not a bit of it. Locke wrote several novels, beginning with 2009’s Black Water Rising, before being lured back to work on hit TV show Empire; it was while in the show’s writer’s room, when she was supposed to be helping create new storylines, that she instead came up with the proposal for her 2017 novel Blue Bird, Blue Bird. “I was working towards something more fulfilling,” she now claims.
She and her sister, actress Tembi Locke, are now attempting to turn the book into a TV drama. But Attica is in Harrogate to promote the paperback publication of her sixth novel, Guide Me Home, which once again features African-American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as its main protagonist.
You may think she spends a lot of time hanging out with detectives while researching her stories, but not a bit of it.
“I am a Black American, so I’m always wary of cops,” she explains. “And for a crime writer, I’m the biggest chicken in the world. I’ve never been on a ridealong – I just read books and ask questions.
“And I’m always thinking I can’t do it again, I’m always afraid.”
One thing that does, however, put a smile on Locke’s face is just how diverse the crime writing field has become in recent years.
“Anybody who’s on the margins is a vital voice, whether you’re on the margins as a woman, or someone from Sri Lanka, or LGBTQ+… It’s via a genre like this that you learn about our moral standing as a people.
“I know a book’s power, to show what it’s like to live in, say, Alabama. Books open up the world to you; it’s how we understand each other.”
How right she is – and what a wonderful way to start a weekend dedicated to storytelling.
images: Gerard Binks Photography
Sarah Morgan studied film journalism at post-graduate level with the BFI and has been writing about TV and film for PA Media’s newspaper, magazine and new media customers since 1996. She’s also written for a wide range of other publications, both online and in print, including the book Offbeat and Intermission magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Talking Pictures TV podcast. When she isn’t watching movies, she’s collecting and reading vintage crime and horror paperback books or, for her sins, watching her beloved Sheffield Wednesday.
