Jackie Malton with (ghostwriter) Helene Mullholland (2022) The Real Prime Suspect.

Everyone has a story—seen it, been it, done it. Agents and booksellers need a hook line or in marketing jargon, unique selling point. Something to reel in book buyers. Jackie Malton’s is in the title.

Jackie Malton had a middle class upbringing. She couldn’t do maths, which meant she couldn’t go to university (which currently affects tens of thousands of others for much the same reason). Her parents thought her a bit thick. University was out of reach  She joined the police force after serving as a cadet in 1970. She was handed a handbag while her male colleagues received truncheons and a higher pay grade for being men.

Police women with dedicated stations worked mainly with other women, overseeing crimes committed mainly by men against women and children. Women's crimes tended to be against themselves such as prostitution. Leicester was a sink or swim experience in which she first experience the ingrained poverty of others. Junior police officers would be expect to make tea for more senior male officers. The bastion of white, male privilege with links to freemasonary (being part of the right lodge helped promotion prospect).

With the help of ghost-writer Hélène Mulholland, Malton shows what it was like not being part of the boy’s club. Institutional sexism a given. Homophobia taken and given back. The corruption she faced within the Metropolitan Police when she moved down to London and joined ‘The Sweeney' Flying Squad. A dressing down from a senior officer after she had supported another woman officer’s allegations of false arrests and stealing drugs that had been lifted by so-called offenders. Those in the work canteen leaving Malton sitting alone. She went to inspect the graffiti about dykes in the male toilets in the station.  

Malton went through the usual teenage angst of having a boyfriend but found herself thinking more about her boyfriend’s friend, Amy. In The Real Prime Suspect, Malton’s  smoking from the hip and hard drinking life helped shape Lynda Le Plant’s award-winning character DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect— ‘who’s the tart?’

‘Ate it. Slept it. Lived it. 24/7. I didn’t switch off.’

Malton’s thirty-year journey from beat cop to detective chief inspector. And beyond that as adviser to The Bill, Cracker, Life On Mars and The Real Prime Suspect. Script writers turn to her to add to the storyline and add that authenticity such a life gives. Joining Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, it’s hardly anonymous if you put it into print.  Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6