Novels · Film · Television
History lives through people.
I’m John Lawless, an author and screenwriter exploring the lives, conflicts and human stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Historical storytelling, often inspired by real events and people.
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JOHN LAWLESS · AUTHOR & SCREENWRITER
For the screen
Newlands
A town built on ambition. A disaster that changed everything.
Following a devastating chimney collapse in Victorian Bradford, a community faces the urgent struggle to save lives and confront the disaster’s human consequences.
Explore the screen projectBehind the work
The people behind
the history.
I am a Bradford-based author, screenwriter and independent researcher. My work explores crime, injustice, resilience and human connection, often through stories inspired by real historical events and people.
Explore the research, the writing and the stories that connect the novels and screen projects.
About John Lawless ↗Articles & News
Behind the stories.
From Novel to Screen: Bringing Victorian Bradford to Life.
By John Lawless
Much of my writing begins with a question about Bradford’s past. Recently, another question has been occupying me: how might these stories work on screen? I have been developing a screenplay adaptation of Fragments of Truth. It is a different kind of writing, even when the characters, setting and central story are already familiar. A scene that works well in a novel may need considerable thought before it earns its place in a screenplay. The ambition is to bring Victorian Bradford to life in...
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From Arsenic to DNA: Crime Forensics Then and Now
By John Lawless
Modern crime investigation has become so closely associated with laboratories, fingerprints, DNA profiles and digital databases that it is easy to forget how recently much of this technology arrived. A detective attending a suspicious death today enters a world governed by scene preservation, forensic protocols, specialist examination and scientific testing. The same officer transported back to Bradford in the middle of the nineteenth century would find something very different. There would...
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Bradford Council Bureaucracy leads to decay
By John Lawless
For some time now, I have been trying to achieve something that ought to be relatively straightforward: to secure the professional conservation of the memorial of seven-year-old John Gill at Windhill Cemetery. John was murdered in Manningham in December 1888. I first became closely involved with his story while researching Stolen Innocents, and since then I have felt increasingly strongly that the surviving memorial to him should not simply be allowed to deteriorate because modern...
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