West Richardson Street

'Life is one big road with a lot of signs, signs and more signs you've got to make up your mind to face reality all the time.' Badmarsh & Shri/Tenor Saw/Bob Marley Shiraz is a newly appointed Police Community Support Officer who discovers the body of an Asian prostitute Mandy in a skip in West Richardson Street, High Wycombe. The investigations lead him to a local taxi driver Asif and a journalist Stacy who works for a local newspaper. Running alongside this is the story of Anna the daughter of a furniture worker in High Wycombe in 1913 and her adventures during these heady times in the town's history. In the background is the spectre of the Assassin whose agenda of racial terrorism drives the story to a profound climax. West Richardson Street is about the past and the present histories of High Wycombe. About lives lost over pieces of dirt and how particular roads and areas of the town resonate with dark and unspoken tales. It's about placing the arrival of Asian and African Caribbean people to Buckinghamshire in a historical context and making them part of this history rather than existing outside of it. West Richardson Street looks at the town throughout the ages but in particular before the war where the furniture industry in High Wycombe was at its height, the early eighties where there were riots and finally 2007 and the paranoid times after the 2006 terror raids. 'The lie was powerful. It had wrapped itself over the Chiltern Hills and the fabric of the County. It was embedded into the DNA of the mighty and the powerful and covered up a multitude of sins.'
About the Author: Saqib Deshmukh was born in South London in 1967. He has worked all over the country as a youth worker and he settled in High Veecombe/Wycombe in 1997. He has been writing since 1984 and had published a collection of his poetry TIMEBOMB in 1992 and has been published in newspapers, magazines and anthologies as well as dodgy publications that he would rather not talk about. Additionally he also been a music promoter, a DJ, an Arts trainer/Tutor, and managed bands such as THE KALIPHZ, as well as setting up theatre companies AIR theatre (1984-1989) and AAJKAL Theatre (1989- 1993 & 1999-2001). He has set up a production company INDUS VALLEY FUNK PRODUCTIONS to do stupid creative things and regularly works as a writer in schools, community centres and for local aunties. In the last six years he has been a campaigner around deaths in custody after the death of a Pakistani man literally on his doorstep and has worked with the family to set up the Justice4Paps campaign. He fears that this has now labeled him as a domestic extremist and that the police are 'after him'. The local police declined to comment on this accusation. In his spare time he likes to eat and sleep.