I bought this with the book token I received for my birthday. The cover is certainly an arresting and attention grabbing one. Before purchasing this book, I read a sample of the introduction, and I just knew I was on to something good. The writing style really worked for me. The author is talking about murder and Londoners cracking under the strain of war, yet I found her prose relaxing, captivating and stimulating.
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It was whilst reading this book that I decided to add an additional component to this review, by charting contemporary (to WW2) mystery novels which illustrated/voiced the ideas Bell raises. It goes without say that this exploration is far from exhaustive. I felt this was worthwhile doing, and hopefully it will be of interest to some. Lindsey Davis in her introduction to the Pan Classic Crime edition of Green for Danger (1944) by Christianna Brand pertinently remarks that in World War Two:
‘[…] the writing and reading of popular fiction did not go into limbo, despite the shortage of paper and ink for ‘non-essential’ printing. Nor did authors have to resort to an invented fantasy world to give readers relaxation from the falling bombs. Contemporary writers went about their business, using everyday wartime life as basis material. Most salutary is that they managed to do so without knowing how or when the conflict was going to end.’
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Amy Helen Bell kicks off her introduction by exploring how an ‘iconic image of Blitzed London’ (see below for an example I found not from the book) symbolises the nature and act of murder:
‘A violent attack destroys one life and exposes lives around it. Once the crime is discovered, everyone wants to know the details. The scene of destructions is preserved for the police, who capture it forever on camera. Newspapers and other media report on the investigation and the trial to an eager audience, encouraging them to speculate about the people involved. Murder, like a bomb, blows open the closed rooms of private homes and personal relationships and exposes their bric-a-brac to the air. Murder reveals what we try to hide and displays all our complex human emotions and vulnerability.’
Bell moves on to how WW2 changed the character of murder:
‘The war created a new character of murder, one that was desperate and brutal, and often random. The social dislocation and the emotional toll of war increased deadly violence in the family and among strangers, while the bomb-scarred landscape helped to hide the victims.’
The last line of this passage quickly put in my mind The Doodled Asterisk (1943) by R. A. J. Walling, where a killer commits a murder during an air raid, hoping that the subsequent fire damage to the hotel fire will obfuscate their crime and victim identity.
Near the end of her introduction, the author returns to this idea of war changing the nature of murder, further adding that:
‘People tend to curb their aggressions with empathy, moral principles and fear of punishment. But in a world of darkness, fear and contingency, destructive behaviours were unleashed. Londoners had to fear not only the enemy without, but the enemy within. The murder rate shot up during the war. Up to 1939, the yearly average was around 250-300 deaths a year in England and Wales. The numbers climb from 288 in 1940 to 406 in 1942, to a seventy-five year high of 492 in 1945.’
Bell acknowledges though there may have been many more, undiscovered.
One of the interesting points raised is that these changes were not stationary and evolved as the war developed:
‘In the early years of war, most murdered were committed in a domestic setting by people who knew each other. The bombing raids and fears of invasion led to a rash of murder-suicides and “mercy” killings within families, as well as unscrupulous spouses seeking to get rid of their partners. In the second half of the war, with the end of the Blitz and an influx of American soldiers, violence moved into the streets. Killings were more random and opportunistic, with casual encounters fuelled by drink, lust, race-hatred or desperation leading to deadly fights and robberies.’
Bell goes on to share a question by Clive Emsley who asked: ‘Murder is rarely as public as … suicide [by jumping in front of a train], so what makes a private, generally personal act symptomatic of national malaise?’ This is the question Bell suggests her book intends to answer and further adds that: ‘In the case of Second World War London, murders show the fault lines of vulnerability in British civilian society and how war exposed people to violence from enemy attack and from those around them.’
Understanding what was expected of people on the home front is also key to comprehending the murders that took place. Bell notes that:
‘During the war, Britain projected an image of a resolved and resilient “home front”, in which a common purpose to defeat the enemy broke down class and cultural barriers and created a new sense of social solidarity. But maintaining the discipline required for total war for six years was incredibly difficult. In recent years, historians have explored some of the cracks in this wartime unity: panic defeatism, xenophobia, strikes, looting, black marketeering and crime, especially violent crime. One of the most important aspects of showing good civilians moral for Britons at home was controlling their negative feelings of fear, anxiety, grief or anger. Historian Lucy Noakes argues that Britain’s wartime “emotional economy” emphasised stoicism and restraint as the key to ultimate victory. When people’s emotional self-control slipped, they were letting down the war effort.’
Another core idea established in the introduction is how private murder could lose its meaning and value in the face of the death toll occurring on battlefields and in bombing raids. This reminded me of Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman (1942) in which Inspector Alleyn says to a colleague:
“Does it seem odd to you, Fox, that we should be here so solemnly tracking down one squalid little murderer, so laboriously using our methods to peer into two deaths, while over, our heads are stretched the legions of guns? … But to hang someone now – ! … It’s almost funny”
The secondary resource Amy Helen Bell utilises to explore this topic is Quentin Reynolds’ A London Diary (1941). In this work Reynolds writes about the trial of Florence Ransom during which an air raid occurred. He says that:
‘Her trial … was one of the most sensational in recent years. That is, in ordinary times it would have been sensational. But today the courtroom was empty […] All of the props for drama were there and yet the whole performance was a flop.’
After the trial he ‘bought an Evening Standard from a boy’ which read ‘Blitz casualties to date: 16,000.’ Reynolds goes on to write:
‘That was it, of course. Sixteen thousand decent neighbours of mine have been killed since September 7th. Naturally it was hard to feel any sympathy or feel that it was important that a half-degenerate woman had just been sentenced to die. The dignity which surrounded her sentencing seemed ridiculous. My only reaction was: “What of it?”’
A degree of desensitisation to private murder during the war can also be seen in contemporary mystery novels, such as The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) by Edmund Crispin. Other instances can be found Plenty Under the Counter (1943) by Kathleen Hewitt. Sometimes this desensitisation is portrayed through dark humour such as when Mrs Meakes is complaining about having to go and look at the dead body to see if she could identify it:
‘They asked me if I’d mind and of course I minded, no one wants to look at a dead face at eight o’clock in the morning, it’s not what you’d choose for entertainment.’
Furthermore, the way protagonist and amateur sleuth, Flight Lieutenant David Heron, describes the crime to various people negates the sensational and the man’s death is almost regarded as mundane at points: ‘I’d have liked snow on the ground, and melting traces of queer-shaped boots, and a scream in the night, and someone fainting at seeing the Inspector.’
Given how quickly and easily life could be snuffed out during the war, particularly in the bombing, I did wonder if this frailty and vulnerability also affected the endings of crime novels at the time. For example, a bomb quite literally takes out a killer in one novel, written just after the war, but set during it. Moreover, the denouement of Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger is morally ambiguous and quite messy emotionally. Finding out the who the killer is does not bring a neat tidy resolution, which is arguably symbolic of the wider conflict going on in the real world.
Bell then discusses more widely the physical effects and damage of war on London and its buildings. She considers how black a blackout was and its psychological and emotional effects. Moreover, she provides a general sensory picture of wartime London, including its sounds. The introduction then goes into the life history of Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian Jewish refugee in Britain, who worked in domestic service. Bell shares that:
‘It was very difficult for Jewish refugees to gain entry to Britain if they, like Ruth, had no money and no private contacts. Britain was still recovering from the effects of the Great Depression and did not want any immigrants who might take jobs from the British workforce. The only job that would almost always allow entry into Britain was the one that nobody wanted: domestic service. Servants were in demands because the work conditions were so bad: long hours, low pay, hard physical labour and lack of freedom. But desperate Jewish women took advantage: 20,000 of the 78,000 German and Austian refugees who came to Britain before the war came as domestic servants.’
In 1940 Ruth Fuerst was interned and Bell describes the differences between the male and female internment camps, the latter not being run by the military. The all-women’s Rushen Camp for example, involved the village of Port Erin being fenced off and the internees being billeted in homes with spare rooms ‘and some internees later remembered the time as almost a holiday and respite from the stresses of blitzed London.’ Fuerst’s story is shared because she was one of the victims of the serial killer John Reginald “Reg” Christie.’ Christie was a war reserve policeman, a role which makes his murderous spree all the more sinister. He was supposed to be there to protect civilians, but instead he was bumping them off. Bell considers how his job and the war enabled his killings:
‘Christie’s murder of Ruth Fuerst was also made possible by the disruptions of war: the passage of strangers in and out of Kensington, the number of vulnerable women and the darkness of the streets. War had unravelled the social fabric of London neighbourhoods and created unprecedented anonymity in its streets. Hidden by the blackout, shielded by bombed-out houses and the threat of random death from the enemy, a new type of murder emerged in wartime London.’
A second victim of Christie’s, Muriel Eady, is also mentioned and her death highlights well the above wartime conditions: ‘Muriel did have family and friends who missed her, but they thought she had been killed by a V-1 rocket and did not look for her for long.’
The Woman in Red (1941) by Anthony Gilbert is one example of a contemporary mystery which depicts how easy it could be to remove someone from circulation and for no one to notice. In the story Julia is kidnapped as part of a wider murder plot, and wartime conditions, leave her vulnerable. Fortunately, she did meet up with one friend before disappearing, who is able to call some kind of alarm, but even so it takes a lot of effort from the sleuth, Arthur Crook to track her down, as her kidnappers are able to use wartime paperwork to manipulate her identity. Gilbert would go on to write, a year later, a mystery entitled Death in the Blackout, where once more the London blackout conditions aid a murderer’s plan. Murder by Matchlight (1945) by E. C. R. Lorac also demonstrates how hard it can be to track people’s histories during the war, due to bombings destroying homes and records. This story even shows Inspector Macdonald trying to interview a suspect during an air raid, but it has to be abandoned in order for him and others to go save lives instead.
Bell’s introduction also takes into account the tendency (in the past particularly) for the victim to be overlooked in true crime works, with attention being centred on the killer instead, a tendency that Hallie Rubenhold challenged in The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019). Bell states her own intention to:
‘[…] offer a new perspective on wartime murders, by telling the stories of the people involved […] A more humanistic, nuanced approach to criminal history focuses on the social context of the crime, breaking away from the heroic “blue gaze” of the detective narrative that begins with the discovery of a dead body, to refocus on a wider view. By placing the stories of murders into the context of the war and into the geography of the wartime city, this book provides a more three-dimensional look at both the lives of the victims and the motivations of the perpetrators.’
Bell also describes the challenges of ‘researching the people involved in acts of violence in wartime London’ due to factors such as bombing displacement, evacuation, internments, and military reassignment. ‘People could die where they were not known, such as the 480 unidentified bombing victims found in London shelters or in the streets during the war.’ This is a situation which could be manipulated to the advantage of a killer, and I was reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1948 play, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’.
Overall, I was very satisfied with the introduction to this book. I feel like it is a model for how one should be written.
Chapter 1: London at War
The chapters work chronologically, so the book starts with the period known as the “Phoney War” and how ‘one of the effects of the unbearable tension of waiting for aerial bombers, along with the first family separations of war, was a wave of wartime murders in London.’ Bell goes on to write that:
‘[…] murders in the first year of war were often characterised by unbearable anxiety and fear: of family separation, loss of home, German invasion, injury, bereavement, death. Wartime fear was an immediate instinctive response to danger, such as that triggered by the air-raid siren, but also a longer emotional state of profound anxiety.’
This chapter also takes in the topic of government policies suppressing expressions of fear, as for example ‘spreading “despondency” could be prosecuted under the Emergency Powers Act’. Inevitability this suppressing of feelings caused psychological tension, and this could affect people physically including ‘stomach aches, skin problems or losing their hair in clumps.’ Given the lack of public outlet for expressing and representing civilian fear, Bell notes that it can be challenging for historians to track it. However, she adds that:
‘[…] there is one place that we can find stories of the war’s effects on families and vulnerable people: criminal trials and coroners’ inquests on suicides and family murders. Many of these cases occurred because people were afraid for themselves and their children in case of bombing and Nazi invasion or could not face wartime separation.’
This ‘desperation’ from ‘unbearable psychological pressure’ from wartime conditions is depicted well in the cases of five-year-old Marion Allalemdjian who was murdered by her nurse Claudina Valeriani in 1939, who in turn committed suicide, and in the case of nine-year-old Pamela Wright, who was murdered by her mother, Lily. Each chapter looks at two case studies, which I think was an effective structure allowing the author to explore a given topic from different angles.
Nicholas Blake’s postwar mystery, Minute for Murder (1947) interestingly comments on the problems of fear and anxiety being suppressed for too long. The series sleuth Nigel Strangeways points out, now that there is less pressure and danger, the stress and emotions which have built up over the war years, are now liable to come flying out:
“Or at any rate, we’ve repressed them, in the interests of making an efficient division and helping to win the war, and because blitzes breed a certain tolerance for one’s fellow blitzees. But now everything has slacked off, don’t you think all those repressed personal feelings are going to rise to the surface? In fact, haven’t they begun to, lately?”
Although this is once the war was over, I still felt it chimed in with the idea of people struggling to contain or withhold their fears and anxieties. And in Blake’s story the question is whether this failure has led to murder.
Chapter 2: Bombsites and Shelters
This chapter centres on the Blitz and begins by considering the sheer scale of the bombing that took place. The bombing brought about the need for shelters, and Nap Lombard find a grisly use for them in Murder’s a Swine (1943), where a body is concealed in an air raid shelter behind a wall of sandbags. Amy Helen Bell points out shelters were ‘relatively safe when full, but empty shelters and bombsites, hidden from view and in the darkness of the blackout, were scenes of terrible violence in 1941.’ The first example of this type of murder looked at is the ‘strangling of Maple Church’, a crime which was never solved. The second of the two cases under examination is ‘the murder of Rachel Dobkin […] whose body was discovered a year after she disappeared [by chance] in the basement of a bombed church […] and linked to her estranged husband’. Bell highlights the changes between the murders discussed in chapters 1 and 2: ‘Unlike Lily Wright and Marion Allalemdjian, who were killed ostensible to “protect” them from the horrors of war, these women were killed for personal reasons – sex, anger and gain.’
To better understand Church and Dobkin’s deaths, the author looks at how public shelters were being used and how a lot happened unseen in bombed out buildings. Bell also raises the point that Church’s experience of the war e.g. employment outside of the home, greater independence financially and socially, ‘shows both sides of the freedom that the war offered: the excitement of spontaneous encounters, and the vulnerability that led to her unsolved murder.’
When reading this chapter, it was interesting seeing how social, gender and personal biases shaped and hindered the investigations. For example, police were convinced for a long time that Rachel Dobkin’s husband was too stupid to have killed his wife, despite his history of violence towards her. During her life, both she and her husband were regarded as being of a ‘low mentality’ and they were perceived as unreliable witnesses when it came to reporting upon each other’s behaviour. However, this chapter also shows women being more involved in investigative work, in particular Mary Newman. She was ‘a nurse and photographer at Guy’s Hospital’ and she was able to help ‘provide a final powerful image linking the body’ the police found ‘to Rachel Dobkin.’ She did this by ‘superimpos[ing] a photo of Rachel Dobkin onto a photograph of the skull found.’
It is at the end of this chapter that Amy Helen Bell comments on how it was in books rather than in censored/restricted contemporary photographs, that ‘the deep anxiety caused by London’s ruins [could] be expressed.’ The examples she gives are Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ (1941). She goes on to mention some of the postwar films which made use of London ruins ‘as hiding places for criminal gangs, postwar deserters and black marketeers.’ Although Bell notes that ‘the reality was even darker.’ It was this part in the book which encouraged me see what parallels I could find with contemporary mystery novels.
Regarding London’s damaged architecture, John Dickson Carr touches upon it in He Who Whispers (1946):
‘A sign of the times, that letter in his pocket. A sign, in this year nineteen-forty-five, that peace had crept back unwillingly to Europe. And he couldn’t get used to it. Miles looked around him. On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne’s Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white flower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along the broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank – with barbed wire so that children shouldn’t fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St Anne’s, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war. Unreal!’
However, when looking up various titles for this post, I came across Elizabeth Ferrars’ I, Said the Fly (1945), which sees Kay Bryant have a more positive response to London’s bombed landscape:
‘Yet as she started walking away a feeling almost of relief came over her, a feeling that she wondered at, that she had not expected. It was as if, now that she had seen this emptiness and stillness, this end of so many things, there was a possibility that she might at last find herself forgetting some of the horror that had happened while she lived there, a possibility that this visit to a bomb-wrecked street might help along the blotting-out of some grim memories of murder.’
Yet I guess it depends on what you are trying to forget, as a killer in one classic crime novel written during the war years enacts revenge for her mother’s death. she and her mother were trapped in a home hit by a bomb. The killer was rescued, but her mother was not, the rescue squad refusing to continue the search due to limited resources and high risk to the searchers. They assumed the mother must be dead already. Alas she was not, and the murderer’s mother died slowly days later, still trapped in the building. It is interesting to see a wartime novel voicing that fear of being trapped/left to die due to a bombing.
Chapter 3: Pubs and Clubs
I thought this was an interesting direction to take the book in, seeing the role of night life during the war. Bell comments that ‘as meeting places where alcohol and wartime anonymity lowered inhibitions, pubs and clubs saw higher levels of violence during the war’ and the author focuses her chapter on the death of two men from 1940 and 1941:
‘Morris Sholman, a veteran of the Great War who had been working with his brother in a pub in Covent Garden, was killed in a botched robbery by a Canadian deserter who wanted money to run away with girlfriend. Harry Distleman, a former Soho club manager with a lengthy criminal record, was knifed in a gang fight in a billiards club by rival Antonio Mancini. Their deaths point to a moment in the war in which gangs still fought with broken billiard cues and knives, while an increasing number of servicemen with guns were getting violent.’
This chapter explores the effect of having soldiers stationed in the UK waiting to be deployed and of having so many young men in and around London with access to personal firearms, as well as how gangs operated in London at that time. The issue of race-hatred also begins to be woven into the narrative:
‘But Soho was not a utopia, and local and international tensions exploded in race riots and gang violence during the war. On 14 June 1940, a day after Mussolini declared war on Britain and the Allies, anti-Italian violence broke out in Soho, as well as in other Italian neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Newcastle.’
I felt Amy Helen Bell’s use of secondary resources was engaging, such as quoting from Billy Hill’s autobiography. Hill was a London gangster from the 1920s. He mentions how when he sliced an X or V into his victim’s face, he always drew his ‘knife down the face, never across or upwards’ to reduce the chances of cutting an artery and killing the person. Bell’s sources sometimes also add a touch of dark humour, such as when a newspaper journalist of the time, Arthur Tietjen, reported on knife crime in London gang culture and shared the story of ‘one man [who] had ninety-nine stitches from ear to ear, and all he had to say was, “The bastards would do it when I’ve got on my new suit!” Whilst internment broke up some gangs during WW2, the conflict also aided the proliferation of others.
Chapter 4: Home
Chapter four takes us back to the home and two different types of deaths. The first example looked at is the killing of Phyllis and Eileen Crocker, both by the hand of Phyllis’ partner Lionel Watson. The second situation involves two Jewish-German refugees, Irene Coffee and her mother Margarete Brann. ‘By October, 1941, the German advance into the USSR, as well as conflicts with their neighbours, made them decide to kill themselves in their Maida Vale flat. Irene survived, only to be charged with her mother’s murder.’ One of the aspects which interested me in this chapter was the sad fact that Phyllis’ mother death in 1940 was predominantly contributed to by her mental breakdown. This had been caused by the sirens for air raids and the subsequent bombings.
I was intrigued as in crime fiction I am more familiar with a different perspective on the bombing, perhaps because they were not written during the earliest years of the war. For example, there is Time to Change Hats (1945) by Margot Bennett, where we are told that Mrs Carter has a rural property, and she was ‘keen to take in Blitz refugees’. However, it transpires that ‘the living conditions are so bad, all but one of the families have fled, before the novel starts, fearing the bombs less.’ Here dark humour is intended, rather an instance of anxieties being voiced. Furthermore, in the Travelling Butcher (1944) by Alice Campbell the action begins in and around disintegrating building, which has been bombed. You would think everyone would be exiting the premises as soon as possible, but Lady Hyacinth remains, trying to wheedle money out of her husband and during their conversation the chimney in the room starts collapsing. Lady Hyacinth’s nerves are made of stronger stuff, as her husband is dead by the end of the scene…
Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger (1944) shows an awareness of the psychological effect of the air raids on people, but is not necessarily sympathetic in its portrayal, as Inspector Cockrill says to his subordinate: “Last night’s air-raid was a blessing from heaven; they’ve hardly had a wink of sleep in the last three nights, and they’re all at the end of their tethers. The murderer is going to crack today, or I’ll throw up the case.” For Cockrill at least the air raids are something he can exploit to solve a crime.
E. C. R. Lorac, who was living in London at the start of WW2, also touches upon civilian reactions to the noise of bombings and air raid sirens in Checkmate to Murder (1944), returning perhaps to the notion of desensitisation. A murder via a shooting takes place, yet no heard the shot. Inspector Macdonald is not surprised, saying:
“Londoners have heard so many bands during their recent history, that a pistol shot isn’t so impressive a row as it used to be […] I suppose all Londoners who survived the winter of 1940 with nerves unimpaired, did develop what the psychologists call ‘a defence mechanism’ – they learned to disregard disessential bangs.”
Nevertheless, whilst doing my research for this post, I did find in some quarters, crime fiction which more sympathetically recognised the psychological strain of air raids. For example, in a later mystery, Murder in Vienna (1956), Lorac includes a character called Fraulein Braun, who is afraid of thunder as it reminded her of bombing.
In addition, She Died a Lady (1943) by Carter Dickson (who experienced having his own home bombed) shows how some struggled to cope with the shock of war being announced. Alec, one of the central suspect characters, is depicted as unravelling mentally once war is declared, and this is displayed in his addictive following of radio bulletins. Whilst Alec is not represented as a saint, the author does show that parallel to Alec’s wife’s infidelity:
‘Matters were straining towards a breaking-point in more respects than one. France had capitulated; the Fuhrer was in Paris; a disorganised weapon-less British army had crawled back, exhausted, to dry its wounds on the beaches where it might presently have to fight.’
Contemporary readers of the novel might not have sympathised fully with the character of Alec, but they may have shared some understanding of his growing fears about the war.
Chapter 5: Dark Streets
The theme of this chapter considers:
‘[…] how the darkness of wartime London led to a lowering of […] inhibitions […] Crimes of all kinds went up during the latter years of war, and especially crimes by servicemen and deserters. Although it was rarely acknowledged during the war, many of the violent crimes committed by soldiers in the capital had a sexual element.’
The serial killer George Cummins is discussed in this chapter, in particular his killing of Evelyn Hamilton, a woman who was only staying in London one night before travelling to Grimsby for a new job. No one heard her being killed and her murderer was only caught because of his extensive murder spree over a matter of days and the fact he dropped his gas mask. In the 1990s Cummins was dubbed the “Blackout Ripper” as some of his victims ‘worked as prostitutes’. The other case looked at is ‘the murder and robbery of William Raven in flat by two Canadian soldiers he had invited home […]’ It was interesting to see that the police were not satisfied with the more lenient sentence given to William’s killers. Moreover, Amy Helen Bell includes some interesting and shocking statistics of the number of violent crimes committed by British and non-British servicemen.
Turning to crime fiction of the era Alice Campbell’s Travelling Butcher includes the fear that a soldier has become an unhinged serial killer. Meanwhile. Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943) is a mystery told from the murderer’s perspective. He is a serial killer, who becomes increasingly reckless and opportunistic, choosing victims at random. Discerning a motive for the deaths is hard and in some ways they symbolise how the war made, for some, murder and the act of murdering meaningless. The fear induced by darkness and what might occur outside of daylight hours is also interesting picked up on in Malice in Wonderland (1940) by Nicholas Blake. Whilst it is set at a holiday camp, rather than London, the site is plagued by a malicious prankster, who often operates in the dark. The anxiety this causes is seen in lines such as this one, when Nigel Strangeways is on the telephone: ‘From the other end of the wire came the sounds of a strong man fighting down hysteria […]’ In addition, Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger also sees a killer taking advantage blackout conditions.
Chapter 6: Waste Ground
‘Why were infants and pregnant women so vulnerable during the war, and in particular in the middle years of the war?’ This is the question asked by chapter six and the answers it offers are interesting. For example, the growing financial burden of caring for a baby was one of the contributing factors. Furthermore, Bell notes that:
‘The burden of childcare always fell on the mother. Millions of women, whether married or unmarried, were on their own, as, by 1942, 2.5 million men had been conscripted into the British Army, 1 million into the RAF, and another 1 million into the Royal Navy. With so many men serving overseas, it was more difficult to get married in cases of unplanned pregnancies, leaving women to struggle with the shame and stigmas of unmarried motherhood. In an era of very few social welfare provisions for mothers, it was tough for women without strong social or community support to survive. In 1943, seven women killed themselves and their infants, from a wartime average of one a year.’
Abortion is a key theme in this chapter and Bell argues that:
‘Women’s death from illegal abortions are not generally counted among the war’s violent crimes. In a sense, they are different, because the victims wanted the abortions and often tried to protect their abortionists from police prosecution if they became ill […]’
Yet she further adds that:
‘Women’s lives were also more in danger from illegal abortions than from murder by strangers. Women’s deaths from illegal abortions made up 18 per cent of the total recorded suspicious deaths between 1933 and 1953 […] and in the years 1943 and 1944, the proportion rose up to 37 percent and 41 percent […]’
Such a death is explored in the case of Phyllis Newberry, whilst in the second story shared, Irene Manton was murdered by her husband. The process of Irene being identified and her killer being caught was drawn-out due to the way she was dealt with after death, her battered body tied up in a sack and all identification sources removed.
Chapter 7: Food Stalls and Cafes
In this penultimate chapter, the timeline jumps along to 1944 and the introduction of the V-2 bombs. This changed how unlit London was, ‘because the new wave of attacks was from pilotless weapons, it seemed pointless to keep the cities blacked out at night. In September 1944, the blackout was replaced by a “dim-out”, where lighting was allowed but only as bright as moonlight.’
Racial tension is most explored in this chapter, with Bell noting that ‘the years 1944, 1945 and 1946 were […] years of high racial tension in London.’ It was interesting to learn that:
‘London had always had a sizeable Black community. At least 15,000 and up to 40,000 Black and mixed-race citizens of African, Caribbean, American and British heritage lived in Britain in 1939, with a community of 3000 people in Canning Town and the Custom House area of East London’s Docklands.’
Bell goes on to comment on the colour bar being scrapped in the British military, the RAF being the last to do so, compared to the British Army and the Royal Navy. But:
‘[…] in 1941, 250 Trinidadians were accepted into the RAF […] and more went to bolster the numbers in the British Army and Royal Navy. The RAF began actively recruiting in the Caribbean in September 1943. Approximately 6, 500 volunteers from the Caribbean enlisted, and of these, around 5.500 came to Britain to serve during the war […] And of the 1.5 million American troops stationed in Britain just before D-Day in June 1944, 150,000 were Black.’
Racial discrimination is something the author explores, demonstrating it with examples such as the time Trinidadian cricketer and welfare officer Learie Constantine was refused a hotel room due to the colour of his skin. At least he was able to successfully sue the hotel and his case ‘was widely reported on in the press and commented on in Parliament, with support for Constantine […]’.
The first case looked at is the killing of Jan Pureveen, who on the 14th January 1945 decided, whilst drunk, to pick a fight at a coffee stall, with ‘African American Herman Carter Robinson, a Private First Class in the Quarter Master Service Company.’ Herman was badly attacked, but the fight was broken up, only, reportedly, for a Black stranger to shoot Jan dead, whilst he was being detained by passersby waiting to find a policeman. The police arrested a Nigerian man named Philip Berry, for Jan’s murder. Berry was a stoker at the War Office. He had previous for violence yet the case for the prosecution was weak in many areas. Berry had never had a gun licence; he had only been released from prison two months previously and was so poor he had to sleep where he worked. Moreover, his hand was so badly disfigured from severe frostbite that he couldn’t even write with it. So how could he hold a gun with that hand? That question was unfortunately not asked at his trial. He was sentenced to hang, but he was given a reprieve, the context of which Bell talks about in an engaging way, citing sources which suggest that:
‘Berry was reprieved not because of the psychological effects of being torpedoed [he had experienced this in 1942], which was never mentioned at trial, but because it was now understood that the racial prejudice Berry was subjected to had a specific emotional impact that could provoke lethal violence – what they call “provocative prejudice”.’
The second case to be unpacked in this chapter is set postwar in 1946, when soldiers were being demobbed, a process which was taking longer than desirable, leading men to desert, which in turn may have pushed them onto a pathway of crime. Bell writes that:
‘These end-of-war anxieties and disappointments contributed to growing racial tensions […] As African American journalist Ollie Stewart wrote in September 1945: “The British want us to go home and make no bones about it.”’
Aloysius Abbott, a Jamaican airman, was a victim of this tension, shot on Christmas Eve, when he was celebrating with his colleagues before they flew home. Abbott was shot in retaliation after a white man (Frederick Westbrook) got angry at a waitress for serving a Black customer ahead of himself, despite the other diner having arrived first. Again, it was interesting comparing how the police, judge and jury perceived Westbrook and his actions, with the police and judge regarding the jury’s leniency (reducing the charge to manslaughter) ill-deserved.
Ollie Stewart’s comment finds echoes in Taken at the Flood (1948) by Agatha Christie. Here, due to postwar austerity, self-interest is more apparent and there are characters who feel they deserve some kind of reward after wartime hardships. This in turn leads some characters to voice resentment at foreign characters such as the Belgian Hercule Poirot. They intimate that he “should go home”, “after all wasn’t that why they fought in the first place?”
This chapter is particularly full of fascinating real-life examples of the difficulties faced and also of some chilling connections. The final one to be included involves Beresford Brown and his family, who moved into 10 Rillington Place, Kensington in 1951. They were immigrants from the West Indies and their ‘downstairs neighbours Reg and Ethel Christie’ were so annoyed at their arrival they sent many complaint letters to the council. Those who know a little history/true crime might have pricked up their ears at the name of Reg Christie. Bell continues:
‘After the Christies left the flat, the landlord let Brown use the downstairs kitchen. While putting up a shelf for a radio, Beresford peeled off the wallpaper and discovered the alcove where Reg Christie had hidden the bodies of the three women he had murdered in 1953.’
Disturbingly at trial his defence was insanity ‘brought on by the persecution of his Jamaican neighbours and the terrible pressures of trying to maintain his and his wife’s respectability and standard of living.’ One hopes the Beresford had better neighbours after the Christies…
Chapter 8: Aftermath
This final chapter considers the challenges of adjusting to postwar Britain for civilians and returning military personnel. Things could not just return to how they used to be. Bell points out that ‘in 1945, 56,000 children were still evacuated. When evacuation officers visited their London addresses, they found that 19,000 of them had no home to return to, their parents had died, disappeared or didn’t want them back.’
A similar situation could occur for returning soldiers, which is expressed by Nigel Strangeways in Minute for Murder. He anticipates some violent consequences when the soldiers return home:
“Stands to reason. Millions of young men trained to kill, proper artful too, look at these here commandos and such […] well they comes back, and what do they find? […] Missus gone off with a chap, couple of extra nippers in the house, some embuskay sitting on his fanny in your job – what do you do? Stands to reason. Start shooting. Violence begets violence […]”
Moreover, Bell’s first case in this chapter concerns Cyril Patmore, a soldier who found that he did not have a home life to return to. He was given compassionate leave as he received a letter informing him that his wife, Kathleen, was 8 months pregnant by another man, and that she had left all of their other kids in poverty with a relative and she had secured herself rented accommodation in London. Ultimately after his return Cyril did kill Kathleen, despite Kathleen and others noticing numerous warning signs this was likely to happen. No one really seems to have tried to stop him. The trial reveals gender bias as the jury reduced the charge to manslaughter against the judge’s advice:
‘He sentenced Cyril to five years’ imprisonment. A five-year sentence was the average for husbands killing unfaithful wives in wartime London, although Constantine Savva, who found his wife in bed with another man, was only sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment. Women who killed unfaithful partners were not seen as having suffered the same provocation under the law.’
Prison sentences for women having committed a similar crime were considerably longer or in one instance acquittal was only achieved because the woman’s husband abused her and had been trying to kill her at the time.
The frustration that Nigel Strangeways predicts will boil over in returning soldiers is also seen in other mystery fiction of the time period, such as in Blueprint for Murder (1948) by Roger Bax. The prologue sees the would-be killer in action during the war, hinting what he went through. The full picture is only revealed at the end of the story. The murderer, whose plans we are privy to early on, are fuelled by his perceived need for the “good life” and for compensation for what he went through in the conflict. Whilst the murder plot is not condoned, the writer is not overly didactic in judging the soldier either.
Housing was another issue in the postwar years, which affects the second case study in this chapter. It was also voiced in contemporary crime fiction such as Death of Jezebel (1948) by Christianna Brand:
‘The enormous shell of the Elysian Hall was in process of conversion into a small township of model homes suitable for the Heroes of England – (who meanwhile crowded in with reluctant relatives, and by day tramped the streets pleading with agents and officials that anything would do, the wife wasn’t particular, not any more…)’
This is arguably intended as a sidenote of humour, but nevertheless it does fleetingly mention the struggle people were having when it came to finding a home, once the war was over.
The final main case of Bell’s book concerns Geraldine and Beryl Evans, who along with Timothy, father and husband to them respectively, moved into a flat above Reg and Ethel Christie in 1948. Bell charts the disintegration of Beryl and Timothy’s marriage, with Timothy becoming more aggressive, cheating on her with her best friend and racking up debts. Beryl’s family with their own emotional issues/dysfunction did not see or chose not to see the danger signs. Geraldine and Beryl were both murdered and it was initially assumed to have been done by Timothy, for which he was hung. But as Bell engagingly explores, things were not that simple. Don’t forget that Reg Christie lived below them… How much was he involved? You’ll have to read the book to find out! The legal repercussions which followed were interesting to read about. Moreover, what is particularly surprising is that when the police found what they believed to be the remains of Beryl and Geraldine, they managed to miss evidence of Reginald’s previous murders, including a femur leaning up against a garden fence!
Amy Helen Bell concludes her book effectively summing up that:
‘The war made people vulnerable in new ways: it uprooted people from their neighbourhoods and cast them adrift, and it took away the scrutiny of neighbours and families. At the same time, the blackout offered a cover for the aggressive impulses of desperate people. the result was a new character of murder, one that was more reckless, brutal and often random.’
Furthermore, she goes on to describes how the death, violence and horrors seen in WW2 coloured how future murder cases were seen.
Overall, I would say this is a fascinating book, which brings the topic and people involved to life. It is well-researched, but it is not a dense academic tome, as Bell has a very engaging and accessible writing style. If the topics mentioned in this review are of interest to you, then I would strongly recommend buying this book or asking your library to get it in.
Rating: 4.75/5