Ashes to Ashes

Travel Guide

Lancashire (Fictional Bradburn)

Paul Finch says:

Bradburn, a drab, post-industrial blot on the Northwest English landscape, is a town already in a state of terror. A gang war has erupted between local drugs-dealers and a more powerful mob from nearby Manchester, resulting in a succession of tit-for-tat killings. In that regard, it’s probably a natural hunting ground for John Sagan, who will hire himself to the highest bidder but who, as he enjoys inflicting horrific and agonising deaths on his victims almost as much as he enjoys getting paid for it, is a serial killer in all but name.

(As a quick aside, I’ve been asked several times now if Bradburn is my own hometown, Wigan, which occupies a similar place on the border between Greater Manchester and Lancashire. The answer is a simple and straightforward ‘no’. Bradburn, though fictional, is Bradburn. The fact that that I recently did a special introduction to the book, and a reading of it in Wigan Central Library  is entirely coincidental).

We’ve put a few locations in and around Wigan though so you can imagine the setting – well a Lancashire town at least and the scenery which Paul sees every day in real life…