Natalie Marlow is a working-class writer who was born and still lives in the West Midlands. After completing her MA in Crime Writing at the UEA, she began her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. Natalie was inspired to write Needless Alley by her great grandmother, who was one of thirteen children and lived and worked on the Birmingham canals.

Praise for Needless Alley

“Transplanting the hardboiled Hollywood noir of the 1940s to the backstreets of 1933 Birmingham, [Needless Alley] has all the seamy glitter and cynical grime of the genre.”

– Daily Mail

“A great sense of period and place…creates an atmosphere of mounting menace and dread.”

– The Times