Chamber Music

Meet Bane. Meet his ex-missus. And a crew of Yardies, and crack-addled cults, and trigger-happy drug lords...

If The Doll Princess was a startlingly original reimagining of noir, then Benn has upped his own game. Chamber Music takes all the genre’s most potent elements and makes them new and vital again.

It’s so good, I almost forgot to breathe.

Superb...The result is a kind of Guy Ritchie-esque gangster comedy with infinitely more depth.

A startlingly new, ridiculously stylish, home-grown voice

One of the most exciting young British novelists working in any genre.

Benn has a great ear for dialogue...[An] excellent book.

Starkly written, dropping in and out of patois and slang, Tom Benn paints a disturbing picture of our society's underclass.

Tom Benn was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm Bradbury bursary. His first novel, The Doll Princess, was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize, and longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey Dagger. Chamber Music was published in 2013.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award 
 
It's Manchester, 1998, and the funeral party for Henry Bane's father is interrupted by a woman from Bane's past. Róisín is back in his life after an eight-year absence, inconvenient for Jan, his latest flame. Róisín has brought a wounded boyfriend with her - and a lot more trouble is following them up north. 
 
Meanwhile, a Yardie who goes by the name of 'Hagfish' wants to take over the local ganglords' territory with Mary, his terrifying weapon of choice. It's Hagfish against Bane in a new turf war: a war that will claim lives and cement vendettas. It's a conflict steeped in half-forgotten history: a history that Bane and Róisín are forever tied to - and which ties them together.

The Doll Princess

The arrival of an assured and exhilarating new voice in literary crime fiction.

Tom Benn, Stockport born and bred, is that rare thing. A startlingly new, ridiculously stylish, home-grown voice. Despite more than a casual nod to a rain-sodden Hulme dialect, Benn's debut is so full of energy and sharp one-liners, it will travel far and wide

I've never wanted to listen to the soundtrack to a book so much. Another element that stands out in the madly bloody but sometimes brilliant book is how the characters speak. Accents are notoriously tricky on the page, but Benn captures the south Manchester patter impressively

Tom Benn is set to be one of the distinctive crime writers of his generation. In Henry Bane he has created a sharp, sarcastic anti-hero with his own warped sense of honour and a narrative voice that is truly distinctive

A new name in the crime fiction section, is about to give us another hero of the genre

A grisly thriller catches the feel and fear of Manchester on the slide

The book is driven by dialogue which is staccato and as sharp as a stiletto. For a debut novel it is breathtaking that this writer writes such incredible dialogue that drives the plot with the force of a fist connecting with Henry Bane's face. [...]He is Manchester's answer to Irvine Welsh

The Doll Princess is a very assured and well written debut, fitting neatly into the urban noir category, with an appropriately ambiguous hero/anti-hero in Bane

The Doll Princess is a crime novel unlike any other; the voices of real people can be heard throughout its pages.

The Doll Princess carries the unmistakably pungent air...of deftly invoked squalor and menace, and is an impressive genre effort

Tom Benn's debut novel is a long overdue good thing in many senses... and there is much to recommend, not least Benn's sturdy grip on vernacular... What's more , he's a good writter of action - a scene in the top room of a nightclub on Deansgate early in the novel is particularly good

The Doll Princess is a promising, foul-mouthed debut in which gangsters and good guys fight for supremacy in a Manchester that resembles a war zone

immerse yourself in the language and the rhythm of the narrative and you're in for a fast and consuming ride through dark territory

a crime novel unlike any other; the voices of real people can be heard throughout its pages

Tom Benn was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm Bradbury bursary.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award 
 
It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside. 
 
For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay.

Tom Benn

Frenetic page-turning tension and mystery... Sometimes nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes knowing in its comment about the rampant misogyny that pervades the underworld. It's a great read, dark and filled with pace.

Seamy, tough and reeking with authenticity, it's grimly fascinating.

Ultra-noir… depicts the criminal underbelly of Manchester with force and style. Good story, superior characterisation, convincingly bleak atmosphere.

Exhilarating prose, gut-wrenching violence and plenty of soul in dystopian Manchester.

It shines a light on Manchester’s violent underworld, as a nightclub owner finds himself dragged into ever-more-depraved places amid a backdrop of murders.

An extremely well-paced piece of writing.

This is gritty stuff… Benn’s prose is fat-free, sinewy, not a wasted syllable.

Manchester’s Irvine Welsh… Authentic but grim.

Benn transcends genre… [Trouble Man] is powerful fare.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award 
 
It's Manchester, at the close of the millennium, and Henry Bane is now manager of an exclusive nightclub. He has a beautiful mistress, a teenage son, and is making moves in a violent underworld to which he is increasingly numbed. 
 
When a young girl is found tortured and unwilling to go to the police, Bane offers to help, and finds horror in a feral community with a respectable veneer. But, by meddling, he ends up endangering those he wants to protect. Not only that, he also manages to incur the wrath of an ailing ganglord, and soon finds himself tangled in a penthouse robbery and an underground boxing match. 
 
Trouble Man takes Bane through a hell, perhaps of his own making, where he is pushed to his limit - and the trouble only gets closer to home.

Tom Benn

Praise for Trouble Man

Frenetic page-turning tension and mystery... Sometimes nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes knowing in its comment about the rampant misogyny that pervades the underworld. It's a great read, dark and filled w ...

Seamy, tough and reeking with authenticity, it's grimly fascinating.

Ultra-noir… depicts the criminal underbelly of Manchester with force and style. Good story, superior characterisation, convincingly bleak atmosphere.

Frenetic page-turning tension and mystery... Sometimes nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes knowing in its comment about the rampant misogyny that pervades the underworld. It's a great read, dark and filled w ...

Seamy, tough and reeking with authenticity, it's grimly fascinating.

Ultra-noir… depicts the criminal underbelly of Manchester with force and style. Good story, superior characterisation, convincingly bleak atmosphere.

Frenetic page-turning tension and mystery... Sometimes nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes knowing in its comment about the rampant misogyny that pervades the underworld. It's a great read, dark and filled w ...

Seamy, tough and reeking with authenticity, it's grimly fascinating.

Ultra-noir… depicts the criminal underbelly of Manchester with force and style. Good story, superior characterisation, convincingly bleak atmosphere.

Books by Tom Benn

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