Inhuman Traffic

You couldn’t ask for better timing. A month before Stuart Neville’s Stolen Souls arrived in the bookshops, the police in Northern Ireland rescued six victims of sex trafficking in Belfast. Human trafficking is the subject matter of Neville’s third book and the Northern Ireland author could hardly have chosen a more topical issue if he had tried.

“I think quite a few writers have taken this as a subject over the last few years so I’m certainly not alone in tackling it, but it did seem a rich field to tap into,” says Neville. “I knew it existed, I knew it was there but I hadn’t realised to what extent, and that it was so close to home.”
Incidences of sex trafficking appear to be more common than you may think. In 2010 the PSNI rescued 23 women who had been trafficked into Northern Ireland to work as sex slaves, and agencies working with prostitutes in Ireland report that the number of women trafficked into the country is on the increase.
That Ireland has become a hub for trafficker is partly due to geography, says Neville.
“What’s also true is that the Republic of Ireland has emerged as a major channel for trafficking people into the UK simply because it is so easy to cross the land border. Once someone is in Northern Ireland they can travel freely to the rest of the United Kingdom.”
Stolen Souls picks up after the end of Neville’s second novel, Collusion, and is a Detective Inspector Jack Lennon story, but this time around Lennon is sharing narrative duties with Galya, a young Ukrainian woman, who is a victim of sex traffickers and on the run from her captors.
Galya may be a victim, but Neville wanted to avoid making her a classic damsel-in-distress. Instead, Galya is the closest thing Stolen Souls has to a genuinely good and heroic character.
“I was very worried about using her as a passive victim that needed to be rescued. Violence against women is a very popular topic but they are simply relegated to being victims, to being passive, sort of vessels for male aggression or waiting around to be saved by the white knight. That was the kind of thing I wanted to avoid.”
“I wanted Galya to be the one fighting for her own survival, not waiting for someone else to do it for her. So much crime fiction is spent on this topic. I think it’s just a reaction against that.”
Neville was disappointed that Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy’s Lisbeth Salander was made to suffer rape despite being something of a super-heroine.
“That bothered me,” he says, but it also prompted him to do something different with his heroine.
“She’s a kind of an anti Lisbeth Salander,” he says. “She is not willing to be a victim, but nor is she this exaggerated ‘man-in-a-woman’s-body’ that Salander is. She is vulnerable and fragile, but she does fight her way through.”
From a practical perspective Neville wasn’t keen on writing chapter after chapter of the horrors trafficked women suffer.
“Because so much of the novel is from Galya’s point of view, it would be a very, very unpleasant thing to write or to read about someone being abused for much of the book. It’s much more interesting and better for the soul to read about someone fighting back.”
Lennon’s encounter with Galya forces him to reassess his past behaviour, which as fans of Neville’s series will know, includes a weakness for prostitutes. This, says Neville, was not a conscious effort to make people think about the possible effects of trafficking, rather it was a projection that grew out of the character.
“He may kid himself that it is a victimless crime and he doesn’t want to think about the actual human cost, but after meeting Galya he has to.”
Lennon’s life has also been turned upside-down as he is now a single parent trying his best to keep on top of his work while caring for his young daughter Ellen. Neville, it seems, is in the process of reforming his flawed detective.
“A big part of Collusion was about him waking himself up and growing up. He would have been quite a selfish man-child, almost like a teenage boy in a middle-aged man’s body. I guess the difference between him there and in Stolen Souls is having spent a year raising a daughter. I think that’s changed him a lot.”
The effects of being the father to a young girl is something that Neville himself can relate to.
“I had a daughter myself a few weeks back – it certainly puts a different slant on the world!”
Ellen, Galya and even Lennon’s neighbour and sometimes lover, Susan, all seem to have had a hand in reforming Lennon. Without spoiling the story, Lennon commits an act of what – to this reader anyway – appears to be almost selfless heroism during the course of the book. Neville disagrees.
“I don’t regard him as a very heroic figure. Any heroism that he has on the surface is mostly about easing with his own guilt. I think anything that he does that is self-sacrificing he does in spite of himself. He doesn’t set out to do anything heroic, he just winds up with choices to make and sometimes he makes the moral choice but I think it could go either way.”
Despite his many moral compromises, Lennon is certainly not the most worst character Neville’s fictional universe. Stolen Souls is about the intersection of various types of baddies – sex traffickers, ex-paramilitary thugs, local gang members, not to mention a slew of corrupt cops and a religious psychopath to boot. In comparison Lennon looks almost like he is on the side of the angels.
“I’ve been accused of being overly bleak in my writing, but part of it is I just like writing villains. I really like writing from their point of view. I guess I kind of indulged myself a little in Stolen Souls!”

Stolen Souls is out now.