Historical Crime Fiction

THE MEADOWS OF MURDER . . . Between the covers

I confess to being a devoted fan of medieval mysteries. I think it started with The White Company. Though clearly not a crime novel, that book triggered my interest in the period and it’s people. Since then, we have had Ellis Peters, Umberto Eco and Sarah Hawksworth, to name but three. I am new to Paul Doherty’s Brother Athelstan books, but was not disappointed by The Meadows of Murder. We are in late 14th century London, Athelstan is priest of St Erconwald’s church, and on the north bank of the Thames, the bodies of those executed for their role in the recently crushed Peasant’s Revolt are hanging rotting from their gibbets. The prologue explains the complex political situation of the day: the King, Richard II, is little more than a boy; John of Gaunt is locked in conflict with the powerful guildsmen of London, while powerful figures like Richard’s mother Joan, conspire behind the scenes. The country is still struggling from devastating effects of The Black Death.

This is no softly tinted golden account of a fondly imagined medieval England. It is full of dark corners and harsh realities. Members of a London Guild who were guilty of what is best described as a group rape of a Spanish entertainer are being murdered, one by one. A terminally Ill craftsman has sought sanctuary in Athelstan’s church for murdering a Jewish moneylender. London’s streets are dangerous places, violent and foul with sewage. Somehow, Athelstan rides the storm, helped by a mixture of his own resolute faith and the strength of his personality.

Athelstan and his friend Sir John Cranston, the Lord Hugh Coroner of London, are drawn to St Osyth’s Priory on the north bank of the Thames. It was there, that Massimo Servini, the abused Spaniard, was taken to die. The Priory has its own mysteries. Why the previous Abbess and Prioress disappear, one with a quantity of stolen treasure? Why is Thibault, the Queen Mother’s confidante ever present? And is Adam the Anchorite actually the brain damaged fool he appears to be, or is his imbecility a cloak masking something far more sinister?

There are touches of wry humour. Athelstan’s parishioners are certainly a peculiar bunch. He has summoned them to the church.

“He glared and he stared, managing his anger, but also counting heads and remembering faces. Watkin, the Dung collector, his nephew, Michael the Minstrel, Pike the Ditcher, Ranulph, the Rat Ctcher, with his two caged ferrets, Ferox and Audax, the Hangman of Rochester, Crispin, the Carpenter, Jocelyn, the Tavern Master, and all the rest of the motley crew.”

Looming over the narrative is the immense figure of John of Gaunt. The third son of Edward III, denied the crown by primogeniture, he was still an immense political figure. Best remembered today for the memorable speech Shakespeare put into his mouth in Richard II, he nevertheless was – briefly, and by marriage – king of the ancient Spanish kingdom of Castile. His son was crowned Henry IV in 1399. The animosity between him and the London Guilds is a key part of this tale. His name? He was born in the Flemish city of Ghent, now Gand. Paul Doherty (via the perception and acuity of Athelstan) raises the concept of what were called ‘by-blow’ progeny, – children not legitimised by marriage. Men like John of Gaunt could have numerous bastard offspring, and it was seen as nothing more than a testament to their virility, but for women of noble birth it was another matter altogether.

The key to the mystery lies at St Osyth’s, both above and beneath the ground. Athelstan uncovers a fatal network of allegiances and grievances that has caused many deaths. The humble priest’s ability to move effortlessly between Court, Cloister and Commons is rather implausible, but Paul Doherty has given us a compulsive read, full of larger-than-life characters, set against an impeccably researched portrait of mid-14thC London. The Meadows of Murder will be published by Severn House on 6th January.

January 2, 2026 0

MURDER IN PARIS . . . Between the covers

It is April 1945, and we are in Paris. The fighting has long since moved east, but the consequences of the previous four years are very evident. Charles de Gaulle has marched at the head of his victory parade, convincing some (but not all) that he had liberated France entirely on his own. Across the country, collaborators are being executed, and the women who consorted too freely with Germans are being roughly dealt with. In the gaol at Fresnes are several women who have been liberated from Ravensbruck. They all claim to be victims of the Nazis, but are some of them not who they say they are?

Frederick Rowlands has been brought to Paris by Iris Barnes, an MI6 officer, to confirm – or refute – the identity of a woman he once knew in the days before he lost his sight. He meets Clara Metzner. She is skin and bone, after her incarceration in Ravensbruck, and he is uncertain. The next day, she is found dead in her cell, apparently haven taken her own life.

Fictional detectives seem to be perfectly able to do their jobs despite various physical and mental conditions which might be regarded as disabilities. Nero Wolfe was too obese to leave his apartment, Lincoln Rhyme is quadriplegic, Fiona Griffiths has Cotard’s syndrome, while George Cross is autistic. Christina Koning’s Frederick Rowlands isn’t the first blind detective, of course, as Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados stories entranced readers over a century ago.

The febrile atmosphere and often uneasy ‘peace’ in Paris is vividly described, and we even have some thinly disguised real life characters with walk-on parts, such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Pablo Picasso, Edith Piaf, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis.

As Rowlands and Barnes seem to be clutching at straws as they try to identify the girl who was murdered – a shock induced heart failure, according to the autopsy – the plot spins off at a tangent. Lady Celia, a member of the Irish aristocracy, asks Rowlands to trace a young man, Sebastian Gogarty, a former employee, who was last heard of as a POW in Silesia. He agrees, and as he and Major Cochrane, one of Lady Celia’s admirers head off on their search, they drive through a very different France. Paris, largely untouched by street fighting or bombs, is in stark contrast to the countryside further east, devastated by the retreating Germans. Gogarty has been living with a group of Maquis, but he returns to Paris after telling Rowlands and Cochrane about the execution of four female resistance members in his camp.

There is an interlude, tenderly described when, after failing to resolve issues in France, Rowlands returns to England. During the elation of VE Day, he recalls a more sombre occasion.

“He remembered standing in a crowd in Trafalgar Square as large as this one. It had been on Armistice Day, 1919. That had been a silent crowd, all the more impressive because of its silence. There had been no cheers, no flag waving as there was now. When the maroon sounded, the transformation was immediate. The roar of traffic died. All the men removed their hats. Men and women stood with heads bowed, unmoving. For fully two minutes the silence was maintained then and across the country. Everyone and everything stopped. Buses, trains, trams, and horse-drawn vehicles halted. Factories ceased working, as did offices, shops, hospitals and banks. Schools became silent. Court proceedings came to a standstill. Prisoners stood to attention in their cells. Only the sound of a muffled bell tolling the hour of eleven broke the silence.”

Rowlands and his family reconcile themselves to leaving their temporary home in Brighton for their bomb damaged home in London, but there is much work to be done. When not involved in investigations, Rowlands has worked with St Dunstan’s, the charity set up to employ blind veterans. Now, with tens of thousands of able-bodied military people being demobbed, will there still be work for them?

The action reverts to Paris, wth Rowlands returning, accompanied by young Jewish man, Clara Meltzner’s brother. It becomes increasingly obvious that some organisation is determined to prevent the true identity of the young woman murdered in Fresnes gaol being revealed. Rowland’s problem is that, despite the Germans no longer being physically present, everyone is at each other’s throats – the rival Résistance groups, Gaullists, communists, Nazi sympathisers – each has much to lose, and violence has become a way of life.

Christina Koning’s spirited account of a Paris springtime takes in so many evocative locations – Le cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the sinister depths of the Catacombs, the newly bustling shops fragrant with fresh baked bread and ripe fromage – that we are transported into another world. Murder in Paris will be published by Allison & Busby on 20th November.

November 18, 2025 0

A RAGE OF SOULS . . . Between the covers

This begins as one of the most baffling and impenetrable of Simon Westow’s cases. We are in Leeds, 1826. He solves a case of fraud, the fraudster is sentence to hang, but reprieved. He then returns with his wife to shadow the man he originally tried to defraud. The man, who calls himself Fox, seems connected to his victim, a Mr Barton, via Barton’s wayward son, Andrew. Westow, like Ulysses in Tennyson’s great poem, no longer has “that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven,” due to a serious wound sustained in a previous case, but his eyes, ears – and legs on the street are provided by his lethal young assistants Jane and Sally.

One of Nickson’s many skills as a writer is to point out the dramatic contrast between the industrial stink of Leeds and the uncorrupted countryside not many miles outside the city. Andrew Barton goes missing, so Jane and the boy’s anxious father make the journey in a chaise towards Tadcaster. Jane investigates the ancient church of St Mary, Lead, solitary and empty in a lonely field. Near the church runs the Cock Beck, which was reported to have run red with blood during the nearby Battle of Towton in 1461, and as she crosses the stream , she makes a terrible discovery.

Quietly, Nickson references the timeless joy of reading. Jane, once an illiterate street urchin, has been taught to read by Mrs Shields, the old lady who has become the mother she never had. Now, Jane spends her spare hours immersed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, borrowed from the circulating library. The printed words take Jane away from the perils and drudgery of her own existence to a world of daring, adventure and hope. In his own way. Nickson does precisely the same thing.

There is a deep sense of poetry in the book, not just in the words, but in the juxtaposition of images. The book begins with Jane witnessing the result of a horrifying industrial accident. A young girl is being roughly carried to the surgeon, her leg mangled beyond repair. This haunts Jane throughout the book, but then, near the end, there is a kind of redemption. One of the regular characters who ekes out a living on Westow’s streets is Davy, the blind fiddler. Jane’s trauma is redeemed:

“Up by the market cross, Davy Cassidy was playing a sprightly tune that ended as she drew close. He gazed around with his sightless eyes and a girl appeared whispering a word into his ear. He lifted his bow and began to play again, low, mournful. Then the girl stepped forward and began to sing. Jane knew her face. She’d lived with it for months. She’d seen it contorted with pain as the girl was carried from the mill, her leg in shreds. Then when it returned night after night in her dreams. Now she was here, one-legged, supported by a crutch, a voice as unearthly sweet as a visitation as she sang about a girl who moved through the fair. She stood transfixed as a disbelief fragmented and disappeared. The pain she’d heard in the girl that day in February had become beauty. The small crowd was silent, caught in the words, the singing while the world receded around them. The last note ended, a stunned silence, then applause and people pushing forward to put coins into the hat on the ground.”

Eventually, by a mixture of judgment perseverance and good fortune, the mysterious Fox is run to ground in a bloodthirsty finale. A Rage of Souls is Chris Nickson at his best – complex, compelling and, above all. compassionate. It will be published by Severn House on 7th October. You can take a look at earlier Simon Westow books here.

October 3, 2025 0

THE DEVIL’S SMILE . . . Between the covers

This is the sequel to The Lollipop Man (read my review from earlier this year) and we are reunited with reluctant student investigator Adrian Brown, and his friend Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and co-presenter of Yorkshire Crimetime, a regional TV show featuring local criminal activity.. Adrian’s social life is not exactly glittering, and consists largely of optimistic – but largely disappointing – trips to gay pubs and clubs in mid 1990s Leeds. A recent Yorkshire Crimetime featured the murder of a young gay man, a waiter at a local Italian bistro.

Thanks to a timely intervention by his housemate, Adrian has survived the consequences of one drunken pick-up too many, in the shape of an encounter with a predator called Edmund. Meanwhile, Sheila’s co-presenter Tony Tranter has gone missing. He is a narcissistic drunk, and has a reputation for unreliability, but this time his absence seems more serious. Then, Tranter’s car is found abandoned under Leeds railway station, bearing signs of a violent struggle. Not long after, his body is found nearby, concealed beside one of the vast Dark Arches above which is the station, and below which the captive River Aire roars and foams. Sheila, fed information by her journalist friend Jeanette Dinsdale, know knows that a scandal was about to break. Tranter was a member of an exclusive and secretive club, where underage girls and boys were provided to provide ‘entertainment’.

The initial, and benevolent, reaction of the TV people is that Tony Tranter was killed in revenge for some criminal who had been brought down as a result of Yorkshire Crimetime’s actions. Sheila suspects differently, but goes along with the initial impetus to record a TV special which will enlist the help of tens of thousands of viewers to bring Tranter’s killer to justice. Adrian, meanwhile, has finally reported his assault to the largely uninterested West Yorkshire Police, concerned

I have tagged this novel as #historicalcrimefiction, but it just doesn’t seem that long ago. I was never an addicted viewer, but Crimewatch was, for a few years a major BBC show. Main presenter, the earnest and clean-cut Nick Ross, with his ‘glamorous assistant’ Sue Cook, purported to solve crimes by presenting re-enactions of crime scenes, and inviting viewers to telephone in with information. It seems bizarre that it lasted as long as it did, and is haunted by the supreme irony that the murder of one of its later presenters, Suzanne Dando, remains one of the great unsolved crimes in British history. Sheila Hargreaves’s show is something similar, and has a huge audience.

It is worth taking a moment to look at Leeds as a crime novel setting. In terms of output, the stories of Chris Nickson take some beating, and he has set his novels in different historical periods, my favourites being the Tom Harper books which follow the Leeds copper from the late Victorian era through to the end of The Great War. In terms of grim and grimy readabiity, the GrandDaddy has to be David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, set from 1974 to 1983, which pretty much encompassed the era of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. My review of two of those books is here.

Back to this novel. Daniel Sellers has Sheila, Adrian, the police (and us) following a series of imaginatively crafted red herrings, until a thrilling finale reveals the truth. This enterprising and addictive thriller will be published by Allison & Busby on 21st August.

August 17, 2025 0

POWDER SMOKE . . . Between the covers

I absolutely adored Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer novels from the word go. The Necropolis Railway was set around the actual railway line near Waterloo that took hearse carriages containing the coffins that would be buried in the relatively new Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, and introduced Jim Stringer, a young railwayman who would join the Railway police, and solve many mysteries, including novels set during Jim’s wartime experience on The Somme, Mesopotamia, and post-war India.

Now, we are in 1925, and Jim is a Detective Inspector based in York. The story is based on a strange encounter Jim had at the York Summer Gala in the summer of that year. He meets his boss, who insists they go and watch one of the attractions – a Wild West Show. They see the usual antics – a fake Red Indian, a ‘gunslinger’ who throws knives at his provocatively dressed female partner, then shoots clay pipes out of her mouth. Both the woman, the Red Indian and the cowboy are about as American as Yorkshire Pudding, but in the audience is a genuine American (who acts as a stooge for the performers, and a celebrated couple in the entertainment business, celebrated film star Cynthia Lorne and her producer husband, Tom Brooks.

The gunslinger, Jack ‘ Kid’ Durrant, is not only good with guns, but has ambitions to writer cowboy novels, rather after the celebrated author of Riders of The Purple Sage, Zane Grey (1872 – 1939) Not only that, the relationship between Lorne, Brooks and himself is, as they say, interesting. When Lorne is found dead, with Brooks and Durrant both missing, it is assumed that Durrant is the killer. Although it is not strictly a matter for the Railway Police, Jim feels personally involved, and visits the place where the three were last seen – the grounds of Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale. This allows Andrew Martin (left) to introduce us to what is known as one of the most dangerous rivers in Europe, The Strid. This natural phenomenon sees the River Wharfe forced through a narrow ravine, just a few feet wide. It has been described as the river ‘running sideways’, rather like a twisted ribbon and is believed to be prodigiously deep. No-one goes into it and ever comes out alive.

The best series are enlivened by recurring subsidiary characters, and one has been ever present in the Jim Stringer novels, in the shape of his wife Lydia. We met her when she was young Jim’s landlady in the first novel. Although understandably distant when Jim was on military duties in France, Mesopotamia and India, she has remained by his side. I am not sure how Martin does it but, without being in the least explicit, he makes her quite the most alluring copper’s wife in detective fiction, and their courtship in The Necropolis Railway was – and you’ll have to read the book to understand the contradiction – chastely erotic.

Central to the appeal is, of course, the heartbreaking descriptions of a railway that we once had, but threw away in various acts of criminal negligence and wrong-headedness. The magnificent smoke and almost animal fury of the engines, the cathedrals that were the stations, the legions of uniformed officials, and the fact that in 1925 you could take a train from almost anywhere to somewhere else with minimal discomfort. All now gone and, in the words of the hymn;

“They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”

Jim, of course, tries to get to the bottom of of the mystery, party because – in spite of his devotion to Lydia – he was slightly smitten by the deceased movie star. The melancholy denouement involves a London and North Eastern Railway locomotive,and a definite sense of closure – if not satisfaction – for our man. In one sense, none of this matters, as our total engagement with the pubs, hotels, railway world, social quirks of the 1920s, and the lingering legacy of The Great War has given us that comfortable sensation we feel after feeling sated after a delicious meal. Powder Smoke is published by Corsair and is available now.

July 31, 2025 0

THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE . . . Between the covers

Thomas True is the son of the Rector of Highgate. Now a sought after London suburb, in the early 18th century, at the time in which this novel is set, it was a country village. The young man has, for some years, been aware of his homosexuality and, unfortunately, so has his fire and brimstone father, who has done his best to beat out of his son what he sees as ‘the Devil’. Thomas has saved up his allowance and is determined to escape the misery.

Unknown to his parents, Thomas has been writing to his cousin Amelia in London, with a view to living with her and her parents. Within minutes of jumping down from the mail coach into the mire of a London street, he has been drawn into a world that is both breathlessly exciting and profoundly dangerous. The world of the molly houses in London was already well established, and would continue as a forbidden attraction well beyond the scandal of the Cleveland Street raid in 1889 in which Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor was implicated, although there has never been any conclusive evidence that he was a customer of this male brothel. A molly? There is a lengthy explanation here.

Thomas meets a young man called Jack Huffins who is quick to recognise the lad as a kindred spirit, and he introduces him to Mother Clap’s which is, I suppose, the eighteenth century equivalent of a gay nightclub. We also meet a significant figure in the story, a burly stonemason called Gabriel Griffin. Working on the recently completed St Paul’s cathedral is his day job, but by night he is the bouncer at Mother Clap”s. He is also a man in perpetual mourning, haunted by his wife and child who died together three years earlier.

Hovering in the background to the revelry at Mother Clap’s is The Society for the Reformation of Manners. They actually existed, as did Mother Clap’s. The Society was, collectively, a kind of Mary Whitehouse (remember her?) of the day, and they existed to root out what they saw as moral decay, particularly of a sexual nature. They were far more sinister than the Warwickshire-born Christian campaigner however, as back then, men convicted of sodomy, buggery and ‘unnatural behaviour’ could be – and often were – hanged. The Society has inserted ‘ a rat’ into Mother Clap’s community. Quite simply, he is paid by his masters to identify participants, and give their names to two particularly repugnant officers of The Society, Justice Grimp and Justice Myre (Grimpen Mire, anyone?) The main plot centres on the search for the identity of ‘the rat’.

At times, the picture that AJ West (his website is here) paints of London is as foetid, grotesque and full of nightmarish creatures as that seen when zooming in to a detail in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic paintings. West’s London is largely based on history, but there are moments, such as when Thomas and Gabriel are captured by a tribe of street urchins in their dazzlingly strange lair, that the reader slips off the real world and drifts somewhere else altogether.

What the author does well is to show up the anguish and insecurity of the men who feel compelled to posture and pose as mollies, in an attempt to nullify the boredom of their respectable family lives. The bond of love that develops between Thomas and Gabriel is genuine, and certainly more powerful than the silly nicknames and grotesque flouncing at Mother Clap’s. The book ends with heartbreak. Or does it? Given that Gabriel is susceptible to ghosts, he is perhaps not a reliable narrator, and AJ West’s last few paragraphs suggest that the Society has, like the President of the Immortals at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ended its sport with Thomas and Gabriel. This paperback edition is out today, 3rd July, from Orenda Books.

July 2, 2025 0

KING DIDO . . . Past times, old crimes

Alexander Baron (1917 – 1999) is a writer who has returned to the consciousness of the reading public in recent times because the Imperial War Museum have republished his two classic WW2 novels From The City, From The Plough, There’s No Home, and the third in the trilogy, the collection of short stories The Human KInd. His compassion and his acute awareness of the highs and lows of men and women at war have embedded the trilogy into the culture of WW2, just as the poems of Owen, Sassoon and Gurney are inescapably linked with The Great War. King Dido (1969) is a book of a very different kind.

We are in the East End of London, and it is the summer of 1911, not long after the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. Dido is, by trade, a dock worker but, after a violent encounter with the district’s 1911 version of the Krays, he takes over the streets and becomes a kind of Reg. Not Ron, because Dido is not a psychopath, but the ‘tributes’ he collects make him a decent living. After a turbulent back alley encounter with a young waitress called Grace, Dido does ‘right thing’ and marries her. They live in redecorated rooms above the rag recovery business Dido’s mother runs. There has been a trend in crime fiction in recent years, which I call ‘anxiety porn’, but it is nothing new. More politely, these are known as ‘domestic thrillers.’ Mostly, they describe perfectly ordinary people whose lives gradually disintegrate, not through epic events, but because normal social tensions, misunderstandings, misplaced ambitions and tricks of fate turn their lives upside down. So it is here. Grace, blissfully unaware of how Dido earns his money, tries to put her feet on the next series of rungs in the ladder that leads to gentrification. However, the family’s journey on the board game of life becomes, via the snakes, a downward one, and it is a painful descent.

Baron grew up as Joseph Alexander Bernstein in Hackney, but he was actually born In Maidenhead, his mother having been evacuated there as a result of Zeppelin raids on London. His father was a master furrier, so it is clear that there is nothing autobiographical about his characterisation of Dido Peach. What is evident in the book is that Baron was aware of the existence of subtle strata within the East End poor. By 1911 the Huguenots had long since moved away, leaving such places as Christ Church Spitalfields and the elegant houses in Fournier Street as their memorials. There remained what could be called the ‘dirt’ poor, and then the ‘genteel’ poor – such as Mrs Peach and her family. What doesn’t feature in the novel, but was exactly contemporaneous, was the upsurge in activity by Eastern European activists, mostly exiles from Russia. The Houndsditch Murders and the resultant Siege of Sidney Street was that same year, while The Tottenham Outrage had been two years earlier. Both events remain writ large in East End history.

In the end, Dido’s downfall is a Hardy-esque orchestration of poor decisions, coincidence and the malice of others. He is denied the dramatic end given to Michael Henchard, Jude Fawley and – of course – Tess. Instead he is doomed – like Clym Yeobright – to still live in the world in which he once stood tall, but bowed and crippled now, alone except for the memories of the people and times he has lost. Baron’s prose here, just as in his better known books, is vivid, clear and full of insights.

June 16, 2025 0

SMOKE AND EMBERS . . . Between the covers

Fans of John Lawton’s wonderful Fred Troy books, which began with Blackout (1995) will be delighted that the enigmatic London copper, with his intuitive skills and shameless womanising, makes an appearance here. Throughout the series Troy, son of an exiled Russian aristocrat and media baron, subsequently crosses the paths of all manner of real life characters including, memorably, Nikita Kruschev. For those interested in Troy’s back-story, this link Fred Troy may be of interest. He is not, however, central to this story. We rub shoulders with him, for sure, and also with his brother Rod, a Labour MP who serves in Clement Attlee’s postwar government. We are also reminded of characters from the previous novels – Russian soldier and spy Larissa Tosca, and the doomed Auschwitz cellist Meret Voytek. The book begins with sheer delight.

“Brompton Cemetery was full of dead toffs. Just now Troy was standing next to a live one. John Ernest Stanhope FitzClarence Ormond Brack, 11th Marquis of Fermanagh, eligible bachelor, man-about-town, and total piss artist.”

As ever in Lawton’s novels, the timeframe shifts. He takes us to 1945, the year of Hitler’s final annihilation, and to 1960 and the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Central to story is the fate of Europe’s Jews, their destruction at the hands of the Nazis, and then their almost complete rejection by Poland, Palestine, Britain, America and Russia after what was, for them, a hollow victory in 1945. Lawton’s story hinges on the lives of three young men. First is Sam Fabian, a German Jew, a mathematician and physicist who is saved from Auschwitz by a misfiring SS Luger and a compassionate Red Army officer. Then we have Jay Heller, a gifted English Jew who, immediately after joining up in 1940, is head hunted into the British intelligence services. Finally, we have Klaus LInz von Niegutt, minor member of what remains of the German aristocracy, who finds his way – or is led – into the SS. He is, however, not a violent man, and only does the bare minimum to remain ‘one of the chosen’. His significance in the novel is that he was one of the scores of staff – cooks, clerks and secretaries – who were in Hitler’s bunker in those fateful days at the end of April 1945.

With an audacious plot twist, Lawton gets Sam Fabian to England, where he finds work with a millionaire German Jew called Otto Ohnherz whose empire while not overtly criminal, is founded on the success of ventures that, while not quite illegal, are extremely profitable. He can afford to employ the best professionals. This is his barrister:

“It was said of Jago that by the time he’d finished a cross-examination, the witness would be swearing Tom, Tom, the Piper’s son had been nowhere near the pig and had in fact been eating curds and whey with Miss Muffet at the time.”

When Ohnerz dies, Jay takes over the empire, and becomes involved with maintaining Ohnerz’s rental property business. While making sure the money still rolls in, he sets out to improve the houses, particularly those rented by tenants recently arrived from the Caribbean. It is when Jay’s broken body is found on the pavement below his headquarters that the story seemingly takes a turn towards the impossible. What Troy and the pathologist discover certainly had me scratching my head for a while. Lawton’s use of separate narratives and times allows him to set a seemingly unsolvable conundrum regarding the ultimate fates of Jay, Sam and Klaus. To be fair, he provides clues, using a rather clever literary device. I won’t reveal what it is, but when you reach the last section of the book, you may need to revisit earlier pages. Smoke and Embers shows a profound understanding of the dark realpolitik that followed the end of the war in Europe, and is full of Lawton’s customary wit and wizardry. It is published by Grove Press UK and is available now.

June 2, 2025 0

DEATH OF AN OFFICER . . . Between the covers

Detective Chief Inspector Frank (christened Francisco) Merlin is a thoroughly likeable and convincing central character in this murder mystery, set in 1943 London. As in all good police novels, there is more than one murder. The first we are privy to is that of a seemingly inoffensive consultant surgeon, Mr Dev Sinha, found dead in his bedroom, apparently bludgeoned with a hefty statue of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god. Sinha’s wife has been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, and has been packed off to an institution near Coventry ( no jokes please) but when she is interviewed she is more lucid than those around her have been led to believe.

Added to Merlin’s list of corpses is that of south London scrap dealer called Reg Mayhew, apparently victim of the delayed detonation of a German bomb. Unfortunately for the investigators, the word ‘corpse’, suggesting an intact body, is misleading. Mayhew’s proximity to the blast has given the lie to the old adage about someone’s inability to be in two places at once.

Clumsily concealed beneath bomb site rubble in the East End is the well-dressed (evening attire and dress shirt) remains of Andrew Corrigan, a Major in the US army. It seems he was a ‘friend’ of a rich and influential MP, Malcolm Trenton.

Merlin’s investigations take him towards the contentious issue of Indian independence, and it seems that the murdered consultant was a member of a committee comprising prominent British Indians who support Subhas Chandra Bose, a firebrand nationalist who is seeking support from Nazi Germany and Japan, in the belief that they would win the war, and then look favourably on an independent India.

Like all good historical novelists, Mark Ellis has done his homework to make sure we feel we are in the London of spring 1943. We are aware of the recent Bethnal Green Tube disaster, that Mr Attlee is a key member of Churchill’s coalition government, and that a Dulwich College alumni has just had his latest novel, The Lady in the Lake, published. We also know that the Americans are in town. As Caruso sang in 1917, the boys are definitely ‘Over There!‘Among the 1943 intake is Bernie Goldberg, a grizzled American cop, now attached to Eisenhower’s London staff.

I am old, but not so ancient that I can remember WW2 London. Many fine writers, including Evelyn Waugh in his Sword of Honour trilogy, and John Lawton with his Fred Troy novels, have set the scene and established the atmosphere of those times, and Mark Ellis treads in very worthy footsteps. There is the dismal food, the ever present danger of air raids, the sheer density of the evening darkness and the constant reminder of sons, brothers and husbands risking their lives hundreds of miles away. Ellis also reminds us that for most decent people, the war was a time to pull together, tighten the belt, shrug the shoulders and get on with things. Others, the petty and not so petty criminals, saw the chance to exploit the situation, and get rich quickly.

Central to the plot is ‘the love that dare not speak its name‘ in the shape of an exclusive club organised by Maltese gangsters. Mark Ellis reminds us that there were no rainbow pedestrian crossings or Pride flags flying over public buildings in 1943, and that there was an ever-present danger that men in public life were susceptible to blackmail on account of their sexual preferences. With a mixture of good detective work and a bit of Lady Luck, Merlin and his team solve the murders. The book’s title is ambiguous, in that Major Andrew Corrigan certainly fits the bill, but there is one other officer casualty – I will leave you to find out for yourself his identity by reading this impeccably atmospheric and thoroughly entertaining period police thriller. It will be published by Headline Accent on 29th May.