fullybooked2017

DIE LAST … Between the covers …

Tony Parsons has passionately held political views, and he takes no prisoners in this searing account of how human life has become a mere commodity in the biggest criminal racket ever to infect British society. Worse than drugs, more damaging than financial fraud and with a casualty list that makes the Kray twins and the Richardson brothers look like philanthropists, the trafficking of people into Britain is a growth industry which attracts the investment of evil men and women, and pays guaranteed dividends – in blood money.

His London copper, DC Max Wolfe, becomes involved when a refrigerated lorry is abandoned on a street in London’s Chinatown. The emergency services breathe a huge sigh of relief when they discover that the truck is not carrying a bomb, but their relaxed mood is short-lived when they break open the doors to discover that the vehicle contains the frozen bodies of twelve young women. The bundle of passports – mostly fake – found in the lorry’s cab poses an instant conundrum. There are thirteen passports, but only twelve girls. Who – and where – is the missing person?

One of the young women shows a flicker of life, and she is rushed off to hospital, but hypothermia has shut down her vital organs beyond resuscitation, and she dies with Max Wolfe at her bedside. He discovers her true identity and vows to bring to justice the people responsible for her death, the people who brought her from poverty in Serbia, the people who promised her that she would find work as a nurse.

The search for the slavers – and the missing girl – takes Wolfe and his colleague Edie Wren to the hell on earth that is the makeshift migrant camp near Dunkerque. They discover a brutal racket run by a group of anarchists posing as voluntary workers, but police attempts to infiltrate the network – whimsically called Imagine – end in tragedy.

Wolfe feels that he has blood on his hands, but this makes him all the more determined, and the deeper he digs, the more convinced he is that someone more powerful and with a much bigger bank balance than the hippies of Imagine is at the heart of the operation. From the mud, despair and violent opportunism of the Dunkerque camp Wolfe follows the trail to millionaire properties in central London and the influential men and women whose lifestyles reek of privilege and wealth.

Max Wolfe certainly gets around for a humble Detective Constable, but he is an engaging character and his home background of the Smithfield flat, young daughter, motherly Irish childminder and adorable pooch make a welcome change from the usual domestic arrangements of fictional London coppers with their neglected wives, alcohol dependency and general misanthropy. Parsons (right) is clearly angry about many aspects of modern life in Britain, but he is too good to allow his writing to descend into mere polemic. Instead, he uses his passion to drive the narrative and lend credibility to the way his characters behave.

The plot twists cleverly this way and that, and Parsons lays one or two false trails to entice the reader, but in the end, a kind of justice is done. This is compelling stuff from one of our best crime writers, and his anger at the utter disgrace of modern slavery drives the narrative forward. Die Last is a novel that will hook you in and keep you turning the pages right to the end. Your natural disappointment at finishing a terrific book will be tempered by the excellent news that Max Wolfe returns in 2018 with Tell Him He’s Dead. You can grab a copy of Die Last from all good booksellers, or by following this Amazon link.

April 12, 2017 0

PRUSSIAN BLUE …Between the covers

Philip Kerr’s long suffering and world weary policeman Bernie Gunther returns in this superb novel which straddles WW2. With astonishing skill, Kerr keeps two stories on the go, the earlier being set in Bavaria in April 1939, with the blue touch-paper for war already lit and Europe simply waiting for the bang: the second story takes us to October 1956, with a large part of Germany suffering under another tyranny – that of the Russian puppet government of the so-called German Democratic Republic. The two stories appear to be spinning happily along in their own unconnected orbits, but Kerr brings them ever closer together until they meet in a dazzling finale.

Bernie Gunther fans will already be aware of the company he is forced to keep in the years before and during Hitler’s war. Previous books have found him working uneasily alongside such monsters as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, but it is his relationship with SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich that Kerr (left) has explored in the greatest depth. Now, Heydrich, ever mindful of his place in Hitler’s hierarchy, sends Gunther to Hitler’s Bavarian retreat in Berchtesgaden, ostensibly to investigate the murder of a minor functionary, but hopeful that Gunther’s investigations will embarrass Martin Bormann, personal secretary to the Führer, and Heydrich’s political rival.

The parallel 1956 story finds Gunther struggling to keep his false identity as a hotel concierge in the French Riviera. In The Other Side of Silence, the previous book in the series, Gunther became tangled in a net of espionage and treachery involving the writer Somerset Maugham, a former Nazi war criminal, and the British Secret Service. A British woman he befriended – and bedded – now proves to have been a ‘person of interest’ to the GDR, and in particular Erich Mielke, the boss of the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi. Mielke travels to the Cote d’Azur, and makes Gunther an offer he can’t refuse. He must either go to England and kill Anne French, preferably with the GDR’s poison of choice, Thallium. The alternative? To be disposed of by the gang of Stasi thugs Mielke has brought with him from East Berlin.

The human link between these two episodes in Gunther’s life is a fellow policeman called Friedrich Korsch. In his former life, Korsch helped Gunther discover who actually put the bullet from a Mannlicher hunting rifle through the head of a corrupt bureaucrat called Karl Flex on that brisk April day seventeen years earlier. Korsch is nothing if not a survivor. Unlike Gunther, who is forced to sail the post-war seas like a latter day Flying Dutchman, Korsch has taken the King’s Shilling – or at least Erich Mielke’s Deutschmark – and is under strict orders to make sure his former boss gets to England to kill the fugitive Anne French.

Gunther escapes his Stasi minders and goes on the run in rural France. By hook or by crook, his aim is to get himself into West Germany where he stands a better chance of being protected from the East German thugs who want him dead. As he travels north and east, the two stories begin, slowly but inexorably, to converge. They used to say that all roads lead to Rome. In this novel, all roads lead to abandoned mines dug deep into a hillside in the Saar region – the Schlossberghöhlen. Here, Gunther tracks down the Berchtesgaden killer, and is violently reunited with the former policeman who helped track him down.

Kerr’s genius lies in the fact that he allows Gunther to drink Schnapps and share a cigarette with some of the most notorious killers of the twentieth century. He allows Gunther to make silent moral judgments on those with whom he is forced to rub shoulders, but when it comes to making big decisions, Gunther always takes the path which allows his head to remain connected to the rest of his body. The dialogue, as always, bristles with wisecracks. Kerr lets his hero come to within a cigarette paper’s thickness of signing his own death warrant, but grants Gunther the wit and wisdom to talk – or fight – his way out of potentially fatal confrontations.

Follow this link to read a review of an earlier Bernie Gunther story, A Man Without Breath. Prussian Blue is published by Quercus, and is out now.

April 10, 2017 0

The Postman Delivers … The Well of The Dead

This is the second outing for Clive Allan’s Detective Inspector Neil Strachan and, as in the first book in the series, The Drumbeater, past and present collide. Glenruthven, a tiny community in the Scottish Highlands, is dominated by its distillery. When the owner, Hugh Fraser is murdered alongside his wife, the village is shattered at the thought of there being a killer in their midst.

As Strachan and his police partner DS Holly Anderson set about finding the killer, they discover that the man they suspect of the double murder is obsessed with his own ancestry, and believes that he is related to a Jacobite soldier who, like so many of his fellow rebels, was slain on the bloody battlefield of Culloden on 16^th April 1746.

Clive Allan (right) is a former police officer of thirty years’ service, and is also a keen aficionado of his country’s military history. This mixture of experience and passion combines to create a novel which will blend the lure of momentous events of the past with the gritty reality of modern policing.

The Well of The Dead is published by Troubadore/Matador and will be available on 28^th April 2017.

WELL SPINE

April 8, 2017 0

THE PLOUGHBOYS MURDER

July 1953. Queen Elizabeth was scarcely a month crowned, children were drinking National Health Service orange juice from their Coronation mugs, and Lindsay Hassett’s Australian cricketers, including the legends Richie Benaud, Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller, were preparing for the Third Test at Old Trafford. John Reginald Halliday Christie was sitting in the condemned cell at Pentonville, awaiting the hangman’s noose for multiple murders.

The new Elizabethan age was certainly experienced differently, depending on which part of society you lived in. Most large towns – and all cities – still had pockets of Victorian terraces, tenements and courtyards which would have been familiar to Charles Dickens. Diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio were only in retreat because of the energetic vaccination programme of the relatively new NHS.

A social trend which had the middle-aged and elderly tut-tutting was the rise of the Teddy Boy. So called because their outfits – long coats with velvet collars, tight ‘drainpipe’ trousers and crepe-soled shoes – vaguely harked back to the Edwardian era. In truth, they were more influenced by the fledgling Rock ‘n’ Roll culture which was scandalising America. Every generation has a sub-culture which, at its most harmless is just clothes and hairstyles, but at its worst is just a cover for male violence. Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, Chavs, Gangstas – each generation reinvents itself, but each is depressingly the same – a cloak for male testosterone-fuelled rivalry and aggression.

On the evening of Thursday June 2^nd, 1953, the green sward of South London’s Clapham Common was teeming with people – young and old – out to catch the last rays of midsummer sun. There were Teddy Boys from different gangs showing and strutting about in front of their female admirers, but the lads who were sitting on a park bench away from the ‘parade ground’ were not ‘Teds’, nor were they affiliated to any particular gang. The young men sitting on the benches included seventeen year old John Beckley, an apprentice electrical engineer, Frederick Chandler, an eighteen year old bank clerk and Brian Carter.

One of the Teddy Boy gangs was known as The Plough Boys, from their patronage of a local pub, The Plough. Spotting the young men on the benches, and interpreting their different clothing and behaviour as an explicit challenge, members of The Plough Boys decided to provoke Beckley and his friends. A fist fight broke out but Beckley and his mates, realising that they were outnumbered, ran off..

Beckley and Chandler managed to get aboard a number 137 bus, but such was the determination of the Plough Boys to right imagined wrongs that they ran after the bus, and when it stopped for a traffic light, they boarded the bus and dragged Beckley and Chandler out onto the road.

Chandler, despite bleeding from stab wounds to the groin and stomach managed to scramble back on to the open platform of the bus as it was pulling away. John Beckley was not so lucky and became surrounded by the attacking Plough Boys and he was struck repeatedly. He eventually broke away and managed only to run about a hundred yards up the road towards Clapham Old Town.

All of a sudden he stopped and fell against a wall outside an apartment block called Oakeover Manor. He eventually sagged down the wall ending up sitting in a half-sitting position on the pavement, his life literally ebbing away from him.

Oakeover

The remaining Plough Boys, realising that the situation had become more serious than a simple punch-up, ran off. One of the bus passengers, made a call from the Oakeover Manor flatsand another passenger improvised a pillow for the victim with a folded coat. Eventually, at 9.42 pm a policeman arrived and just one hour later, John Beckley was found to have six stab wounds about his body and one to his face. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

There was no shortage of suspects among the South London gangs. Police swiftly narrowed the field down to six suspects. All were arrested and charged with John Beckley’s murder. Two of the gang denied having been on Clapham Common; two admitted being there, but denied involvement. but all under persistent questioning, later confessed to having taken some part in the attack, though all denied using a knife.

Clapham-Observer-426x261

Five youths were initially charged by the Police, with one more charged a few days later, and they were remanded to Bow Street. After a three-day hearing, the case was sent to the Old Bailey for trial. The charged were a 15 year-old shop assistant Ronald Coleman, Terrance Power aged 17 and unemployed, Allan Albert Lawson aged 18 and a carpenter, a labourer Michael John Davies aged 20, Terrence David Woodman, 16, a street-trader and John Fredrick Allan, aged 21, also a labourer.

Michael John Davies, (right) the 20 year old labourer from Clapham, never denied being in the fight. “We all set about two of them on the pavement” he said “I didn’t have a knife, I only used my fists.”

On Monday 14th September 1953, at the Old Bailey, Ronald Coleman and Michael John Davies pleaded not guilty to murdering John Beckley. The four others were formally found not guilty after Christmas Humphreys, (left) the prosecutor for the Crown, said he was not satisfied there was any evidence against them on this indictment. However they were charged with common assault and kept in custody.

A Daily Mirror headline during the trial simply said Flick Knives, Dance Music and Edwardian Suits.

The trial of Coleman and Davies lasted until the following week when the jury, after considering for three hours forty minutes, said they were unable to agree a verdict.
Mr Humphreys, for the prosecution, said that they did not propose to put Coleman on trial again for murder and a new jury, on the direction of the judge, returned a formal verdict of not guilty. Coleman was charged with common assault along with the four others for which they all received six or nine months in jail.

Michael John Davies’ trial for the murder of John Beckley began on 19th October 1953. Counsel for both the defence, Mr David Weitzman, QC and Mr Christmas Humphreys for the prosecution were the same as for the former trial and the same witnesses appeared.

1953 Newspapers Clapham Common

Having seen the attack from the top deck of the 137 bus, Mary Frayling told the Police that she had seen a particular youth whom she described as the principal attacker put what appeared to be a green handled knife into his right breast pocket. He was wearing a gaudy tie which he removed, putting it in another pocket. She later identified him as John Davies.

How reliable a witness was Mary Frayling? It was late in the evening and her view of the fight on the moving bus with its internal lights on must have been obscured by both the relatively small windows of the bus and the large trees along side the road. In fact Mary Frayling had initially picked out John Davies as the main perpetrator while he was standing in the dock of a local south London court and not in an organised identity parade.

Despite the absence of the knidfe that killed John Beckley, the jury took just two hours to return with a guilty verdict, and Davies was sentenced to death.

Although the actual murder weapon was never found there was a knife that was almost treated as such by Christmas Humphreys and the prosecution during the trial. It was a knife bought by Detective Constable Kenneth Drury in a jewellers near the Plough Inn for three shillings ostensibly as an example of what could have been used by Davies. Incidentally, Drury, (right) Drury one of the investigating officers in the Beckley murder case, would later become Commander of the Flying Squad in the 1970s and in 1977 was convicted on five counts of corruption and jailed for eight years.

Almost immediately after the guilty verdict there were suspicions to many that there had been a gross miscarriage of justice. Michael John Davies’ case went to appeal and eventually to the House of Lords both to no avail. However after many petitions to the Home Secretary he granted a reprieve for Davies after 92 days in the Condemned Cell. In October 1960 Michael John Davies was released from Wandsworth Prison after seven years, although not officially pardoned, he was now a free man.

The killing of John Beckley had a chilling resonance many years later with another notorious stabbing, the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Once again, there would be attack by a gang of young men. Once again, a knife would be the weapon, but would never be found. Once again it would be very much open to doubt as to who struck the fatal blow. Although Stephen’s death was due to a racist attack, the killing of John Beckley was equally tribal – a young life taken because he was different.

April 6, 2017 0

THE REDEMPTION OF CHARM … Between the covers

This is the final part of Frank Westworth’s startling Killing Sisters trilogy, in which JJ Stoner – a black ops ex-SAS type – pits his wits against the physical wiles and mental agility of three violent sisters, known as Charm, Chastity and Charity. Readers new to the series are warned not to expect a hero they are likely to fall in love with any time soon. Stoner lives – unencumbered by the burden of empathy – in an existentialist world of which he is the deep dark blue centre.

“He simply appeared to lack both curiosity – which was famously fatal to felines – and appeared also to be wondrously capable of detaching himself from everything unimportant to him.”

He has killed at the bidding of his masters, who are shadowy government types, but now things have changed. Stoner has been stitched up, people close to him have been badly hurt, and he has retreated from the his former world. He is shattered, mentally and physically.

Exactly what is Stoner’s world? In physical terms, it consists of a love for Harley Davidson motorcycles, a serious coffee addiction, and a passion for blues guitar. He still owns the Blue Cube, a jazz and blues nightspot, keeps many of the tools of his trade in a former workshop tucked away in an anonymous industrial estate, and has among his acquaintances many strange and shadowy people, including the enigmatic pair Menace and Mallis, who orchestrate violence in the smoky limbo which exists between the authorities and others who seek only subversion. Then, of course, we have the sisters.

Charity has died. She was not killed in the line of dubious professional duty, but from a particularly virulent cancer, although her actual death was at the hands of her sister, by way of a mercy killing. The two remaining sisters are polar opposites in looks and demeanour. Chastity is a blonde hardbody with a ripped physique and a penchant for violent – and sometimes bloody – sex. Charm, while equally amoral, sexually voracious and manipulative as her surviving sister, has the outward appearance and manner of an attractive middle class suburban housewife.

The plot is jarringly simple. It is a variation on the trope whereby a retired special operative comes back from his rural retreat to do one final job. This is by no means a criticism because the book is a long highway of intense dialogue and character, with rest areas offering wild violence and inventive eroticism. The final job in this case is the hunting down of an almost mythical Irish killer called Blesses, who served her apprenticeship in The Troubles.

“She has a way with her eyes – I can’t tell you how it works – because I don’t understand it – but it was brilliant as a way of getting information from reluctant Provos. She didn’t need to screw them, thus revealing to us how crap was the UK’s honey-trap technique, but somehow made them want to talk to her about … well … everything. I mean that. Everything. Anything.”

We learn that it is her manipulation of people’s minds and bodies which has led to Stoner’s retirement, before which he was forced to watch a video showing his girlfriend being first raped and then – literally – gutted.

I have to declare an interest here. In terms of motorcycles, I never advanced beyond an inoffensive Honda back in the 1970s, but I do love JJ Stoner’s passion for guitars, and his creator’s lovely name-dropping of snatches of 1960s pop lyrics. There’s even a series of chapter headings all taken from one of the great songs – She’s Not There. You aren’t that old? That’s no crime, but take a listen, while you ignore the awful miming. Click on the image to watch the video.

The novel is both stylish and stylised. The dialogue is mannered and full of whip smart responses and put-downs. Despite the immediate plot being simple, the backstory has more than just a drizzling of Twin Peaks about it. If we think we know what is going on, then we probably don’t, but we come to expect appearances by random enigmatic characters who must be significant, but we are never quite sure why.

Like its two predecessors, The Redemption of Charm is immensely entertaining and another bravura performance from Frank Westworth (right), who shares his creation’s love of Harleys and fine guitars. We are led to believe that a love of killing and a knowledge of inventive ways to use an SAS dagger are skills that, to date, divide the two men.

Frank Westworth wrote an entertaining piece for Fully Booked, in which he outlined his favourite – theoretical – ways of killing people. Follow the link to read Killing Me Softly.

A Last Act of Charity was published in September 2014, details here.

The Corruption of Chastity was published in September 2015, details here.

The Redemption of Charm is out now, details here.

All three books are published by Book Guild Publishing.

April 1, 2017 0

WILD CHAMBER … Between the covers

WILD CHAMBER by CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

When a woman is found strangled in one of those little gated parks within a square of houses, unique to London, the Metropolitan Police’s Peculiar Crimes Unit swings into action. Led – and sometimes misled – by its two extremely senior detectives, John Bryant and Arthur May, the other members of the PCU realise that they are faced with an outdoor version of the crime fiction staple – the locked room mystery.

Other murders follow, and each has been committed in one of the parks and gardens – the Wild Chambers – which are scattered throughout central London. Are the gardens linked, like some erratically plotted ley line? Why are the murders connected to a tragic freak accident in a road tunnel near London Bridge? Why are the murder sites speckled with tiny balls of lead?

For Arthur Bryant – and his creator – London’s past is like a great sleeping creature buried beneath the layers of the city’s history. Sometimes it stirs in its slumber, and the vibrations are felt far above, by those who wish to feel. On other occasions, it sighs, and its breath stirs the leaves in the trees of memory, but only people like Bryant, for whom the present is just a footnote in the chapter of life, can hear the rustling.

Bryant’s unique relationship with London’s vibrant and violent past is described thus:

“London’s lost characters were to him close companions, from the bodysnatchers of Blenheim Street to the running footman of Mayfair and the rat man of Tottenham Court Road. He saw Queen Elizabeth I dancing alone on rainy days in Whitehall Palace
and female barbers shaving beards in Seven Dials, but he could barely recall his mother’s face.”

Fowler came up with the brainwave of having Bryant undertake a course of experimental chemical therapy to treat a life-threatening condition. He recovered, but the drugs have left him prone to out-of-body experiences. These – and here is The Fairy Feller’s masterstroke – allow him to have occasional meetings with pivotal figures from London’s past, such as Sir William Gilbert and Samuel Pepys. Such is the spell that Fowler casts, that these seem perfectly natural and without artifice.

Fowler is, among other things, a comic genius. He mines the rich and productive seam of peculiarly English comedy which gave us George and Weedon Grossmith,
J B ‘Beachcomber’ Morton, the sublime pretensions of Anthony Aloysius Hancock and the surreal world of Basil Fawlty. The book is full of great gags and very good one-liners, such as the world view of a British Library researcher who is consulted for his erudition:

“I expect my libraries and churches to be like my ex-wife:
unlovely, unforgiving, and underheated when you’re inside them.”

Along the way, Fowler (right) has the eagle eye of John Betjeman in the way that he recognises the potency of ostensibly insignificant brand names and the way that they can instantly recreate a period of history, or a passing social mood. At one point, Bryant tries to pay for a round of drinks in a pub:

“Bryant emptied his coat pocket onto the bar counter and spread out seventeen and sixpence three farthings in pre 1973 money, two tram tickets and a Benwell’s Aerial Bombshell left over from a long-past Guy Fawkes night.”

Sometimes Fowler throws in a literary reference that is tailor made for the job. When John May exclaims:

“God, it’s as cold as Keats’s owl in here..”

… I had to reach for my Oxford Book of English Verse to confirm a vague schoolboy memory of Keats;

“St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold”

Fowler has his own view of the modern world, and he occasionally treats himself to the luxury of having a character give voice to it. One of Bryant’s eccentric acquaintances lets rip:

“I’m staying where no one who’s interested in singing competitions or baking shows will ever venture. I pray that when we find life on another planet it turns out to be a lot more fun than ours and that they have relaxed immigration laws. I really do prefer 1752. If we’d had the internet back then people would have spent their days looking at Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, not shots of Justin Bieber’s dick.”

Such is the rich entertainment that Fowler serves up – bravura writing, poignancy, compassion, complex plotting, biting humour and a unique view of London’s landscape – that it doesn’t really matter who did what to whom, but he stays staunch and true to the crime fiction genre and gives us the answer to the intricate whoddunnit he has constructed. I have read all the previous Bryant and May novels, and this gem more than maintains the high standard Fowler has set for himself. If you love an intriguing murder plot, sparkling humour, wonderful scene-setting and brilliantly stylish writing, then get hold of a copy of this. You won’t be sorry. Wild Chamber is out now.

March 26, 2017 0

COMPETITION … Win a copy of Earthly Remains by Donna Leon

Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti has become a firm favourite with crime fiction readers the world over, and now you have the chance to win a hardback copy of his latest adventure, worth £18.99, just days after its UK release.

Brunetti is feeling his age, and the constant pressure of the expectations of his bosses in La Questura has led to him making an error of judgment which threatens to derail his career. Rather like the football manager who substitutes a player before he can collect the second Yellow card, Brunetti’s wife insists he takes leave of absence, and packs him off to stay with a relative on the quiet and thinly populated island of Sant’Erasmo. But this, of course, is a crime thriller, and we all know that recuperating detectives always attract dark deeds. In this case it is the disappearance of Davide Casati, the caretaker of the house. Brunetti is drawn reluctantly but inevitably in the search for the man, and it soon becomes apparent that he would have had more rest if he’d stayed at home.

All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning this book, is to email Fully Booked at the address below, and put the word Brunetti as the email subject.

fullybooked2016@yahoo.com

Your name will go into the hat, and a winner will be drawn in the usual way. The competition closes at 10.00pm GMT on Sunday 9th April. Due to postage costs, the competition is restricted to residents of Great Britain and the Irish Republic.

March 25, 2017 0

THE MURDER OF STEPHEN LAWRENCE

Some would say that no murder in British history has resonated so loudly – and for so long – as the killing of Stephen Lawrence on the night of 22^nd April 1993. While waiting for a bus home on a street in the London suburb of Eltham, Lawrence was surrounded by a gang of white youths and fatally stabbed.

It has become axiomatic in the reporting of murdered black youths to say that they were promising footballers, ambitious musicians or innocent victims in gang warfare, but Stephen Lawrence was a genuinely decent person, with caring and supportive parents. He was working his way through the education system, and had no connection with the debilitating street culture which still condemns many such young men to lives of crime and hopeless underachievement.

Although immediate investigations into Stephen’s murder identified credible and likely suspects, the police who were involved at the time have been forever tainted with accusations of – at best – total incompetence, and – at worst – breathtaking corruption. The young men who were suspected of Stephen’s murder were all part of the criminal underworld in that part of London. Their parents were career criminals, and the grip that such people can have on a community has been seen time and time again, as in the case of the dreadful Sonnex family, whose fiefdom is the south east London district of Deptford.

Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt and Luke Knight were the initial suspects in the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, alongside Gary Dobson and David Norris. All were, to differing degrees, the product of their upbringing by adults on the fringes of – if not deeply embedded in – institutionalised criminal behaviour, contempt for the law, and a visceral hatred of anyone outside their own tribal group.

After a bungled, and possibly corrupt, police investigation failed to bring anyone to court, Stephen Lawrence’s parents brought a private prosecution in 1994. Despite top QCs working pro bono, the case failed due to grave doubts about the reliability of the key witness, Duwayne Brooks, who had been with Stephen at the time of his murder.

In 1997, at the long-delayed inquest into the murder, the five men suspected of the killing refused to co-operate and maintained strict silence. Despite direction to the contrary by the Coroner, the jury returned the verdict that Stephen Lawrence was killed “in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths.” Later that year, The Daily Mail named the five as Stephen’s killers, and invited them to sue for defamation. Needless to say, none of the five took up the challenge. Below, the five suspects run the gauntlet of a furious crowd after the inquest.

Also in 1997, the Home Secretary Jack Straw ordered an enquiry into the affair, headed by Sir William Macpherson. The findings, in 1999, were sensational. Among other conclusions, Macpherson stated that the original Metropolitan Police Service investigation had been incompetent and that officers had committed fundamental errors, including: failing to give first aid when they reached the scene; failing to follow obvious leads during their investigation; and failing to arrest suspects. Most damning of all was the view that The Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist.

Despite the devastating views of The Macpherson Report, the five suspects continued their criminal lives, occasionally being convicted, serving short sentences, and then returning to their normal lifestyle. It wasn’t until November 2011, eighteen years after Stephen Lawrence had been struck down, that two of the five suspects were brought to court for his killing. In conditions of absolute secrecy and press lockdown, Gary Dobson and David Norris were tried at The Old Bailey. On 3 January 2012, Dobson and Norris were found guilty of Lawrence’s murder. The two were sentenced on 4 January 2012 to detention at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, equivalent to a life sentence for an adult, with minimum terms of 15 years and 2 months for Dobson and 14 years and 3 months for Norris. The relative leniency of the sentences reflects the age of Dobson and Norris (below) at the time of the killing.

And the legacy of that night on a chilly spring evening on a suburban London street, almost a quarter of a century ago? This is from a recent article in The Daily Telegraph.

“Ennobled last year (2013), the Baroness, 60, maintains a relatively high profile as an activist and arbiter on community relations, and has appeared everywhere from the Tate gallery (as the subject of a Turner Prize-winning painting) to the Olympic Games opening ceremony and Desert Island Discs. In public, she comes across as imperturbable, even detached from the fiercely emotional issues that surround her. There is an unmistakeable Britishness about her that speaks both to her generation and the manner in which she was brought up.”

Neville Lawrence, however has fared differently.

“Today, Mr Lawrence lives in Jamaica, a short distance from Stephen’s grave. The only public memorial to the teenager in Britain is a pavement plaque in Eltham, south-east London, close to where he died. It has been repeatedly defaced with eggs, excrement and racist graffiti, and the family decided that Stephen would rest more peacefully in their ancestral homeland.

The distance – physical and otherwise – between the Lawrences now is so great that neither can really say if it was Stephen’s death that ended their marriage. Baroness Lawrence has hinted that it was headed for trouble anyway, but Neville tends to differ.

“Our world began falling apart from the moment the hospital staff told us our son had died,” he has said. “For some reason that I have tried to understand, and can’t, we couldn’t reach out to each other. We stayed together for another six years, but from that day we never physically touched each other again.”

Below – Doreen and Neville Lawrence

March 22, 2017 0

ON MY SHELF … 21st March 2017

SKELETON GOD by ELIOT PATTISON
Last year I read and enjoyed Blood of the Oak, Pattison’s saga of revolutionary America, but now he returns with a very different kind of tale altogether, and it is the ninth novel in the series featuring Inspector Shan Tao Yun. Previous books in the series have highlighted how the Inspector has struggled with his conscience over his government’s treatment of Tibet. Now, Shan Tao Yunh has, ironocally, been exiled to a remote Tibetan town. His latest case involves a violent ghost and two corpses – one over fifty years old, and another all too recent. Once more, Pattison writes an engaging and intricate thriller while shining a light on the complex and sometimes murderous relationship between the ancient mountain kingdom and its powerful master. Available as a Kindle or in hardback from 13th April.

FATAL PURSUIT by MARTIN WALKER
From troubled Tibet to deception in the Dordogne, as Martin Walker brings us another ‘ninth in the series’, but fans of Chief of Police Bruno Courreges will know not to expect political polemic, but something with rather more of a warm glow about it. They will not be disappointed as, against the inimitable backdrop of the the Périgord and what has been described as Gastroporn, Courreges takes time out from enjoying the good life to solve a mystery involving a mythically rare vintage car, a murdered researcher and – heaven forfend – links to international terrorism. Fatal Pursuit was published as a hardback and in Kindle in June 2016, and is now available as a paperback

AMNESIA by MICHAEL RIDPATH
“My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have..”
Macbeth’s lament could equally apply to Alastair Cunningham. Living alone in his lochside cottage in the Scottish Highlands, the retired doctor certainly lacks troops of friends. When he falls and knocks himself out, his recovery in a hospital bed is attended by a loss of memory. His confusion about his past – and present – is thrown into sharp relief when it the possibility arises that he could have been involved in a murder – that of his lover – decades earlier. A young woman named Clémence finds a manuscript in Cunningham’s cottage, and as she reads, she finds to her horror that the murder victim was none other than her grandmother. You can get hold of Amnesia in paperback and Kindle format from 4th May.

DEFECTORS by JOSEPH KANON
Joseph Kanon’s books have been described as “John le Carré meets Graham Greene” and he has certainly occupied the same territory as his illustrious fellow writers. With such best sellers as Leaving Berlin, Istanbul Passage and The Good German already regarded as classics of the genre, fans of the Pennsylvania-born author will be delighted that he has a new title due in the early summer. He takes us back to 1961. Stalin is eight years dead, and has been named and shamed as a vicious despot by Nikita Khruschev, who has tightened his grip on power in the Kremlin. When an American defector to the Soviet Union decides to publish his memoirs, they expose truths which shock both the CIA in their Virginia stronghold of Langley and their Soviet counterparts the KGB in Moscow’s Lubyanka. This will be on sale as hardback or as a Kindle from 1st June.