London Review of Crooks

We know about the five London murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. We’ve heard of the Thames Torso killings. We’ve seen films about the Hammersmith Nude crimes. We’ve streamed the London Kills police procedural. And, of course, we’ve read about the slayings solved by Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. But for all that, few have ever heard of the murders of Harry Distleman, Phyllis Newberry, William Raven, and Irene Manton.

These four are among the many London murder victims unearthed — brought to life, if you will forgive the phrase — in one of the most unusual tales yet of Great Britain’s ordeal during the Second World War. Adding to histories of blackouts, ration cards, buzz bombs, mounds of destruction, Tube encampments, unexploded munitions, massive relocations, and general privation, Amy Helen Bell has assembled a  collection of — with apologies to Shakespeare and, more recently, Bob Dylan — murders most foul. They reveal the black underbelly of England’s finest hour, for it turns out that during the war, certain Britons were willing to do more than fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds.

A historian at Huron University College, Western University, in Ontario, and the author of two previous works on crime in wartime London, Bell brings the scholar’s care, the archivist’s patience, the police lieutenant’s tenacity, and the detective’s eye to perhaps the last unexplored element of wartime London. (What could possibly remain? London pets during the war? They already have been examined in book form.) The result is a ripping good story intertwined with a portrait of a city in stress and under siege. To quote the English novelist Louise Doughty on murder, “It’s the very awfulness of this crime that makes reading about it feel so . . . cozy.”

If in wartime, as the Broadway lyricist Maury Yeston might tell us, death takes no holiday, then Bell focuses the message, making it clear that murder doesn’t either. At a time of widespread distress, depression, penury, suicides, sunken ships, battlefield losses, and other forms of hardship, passions were high and murder, if not rampant, was at least inventive. Two serial killers made their grotesque rounds, and grisly butchery emerged as a murderous art form. “The war created a new character of murder, one that was desperate and brutal, and often random,” Bell tells us. “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.” And because Bell is a professor, she goes a step farther than P. D. James, who wouldn’t want to interrupt the action, might go, explaining, “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.”

The average reader, eager to discover whether Colonel Mustard employed the candlestick in the billiards room, might dismiss such occasional dips into sociology as academic posturing, but Bell is right to point out that fundamental British values such as the rule of law were at stake in the fighting — and that the same values were equally at stake in the capital’s streets. Moreover, murder in wartime London occurred in darkness both real (as a result of blackouts) and metaphorical (Winston Churchill described the period just before Dunkirk as the “darkest moment,” and a 2018 bio-drama of the life of the wartime prime minister was titled Darkest Hour).

It was a time when barbarous impulses were in the air, and though Londoners found comfort in Vera Lynn’s sentimental “We’ll Meet Again” (“We’ll meet again / Don’t know where / Don’t know when / But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day”), there was no guarantee, maybe no likelihood, that everyone would be reunited. In fact, the real soundtrack of London in those days wasn’t so much the voice of the comely entertainer from East Ham but the air‑raid signals, the blast of anti-aircraft guns, and the roar of German bombers. They dominated as much as the strains of the music hall and the cabaret.

If Under Cover of Darkness were a West End production rather than a scholarly hardcover, an evocative description of its setting would go much this way, in Bell’s own rendering: “The blackness, the rubble-strewn streets, the anonymous dead and the emotional tension created an atmosphere of fear in London’s streets. Even more terrifying was the thought of an anonymous killer lurking in the blacked-out streets, ready to strike the unwary, and escaping unseen down the darkened alleyways.”

It was a period in which Agatha Christie wrote Curtain (starring Poirot) and Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple), but Bell’s work is the product not of an active if macabre imagination but instead of hours examining old news accounts, plumbing forgotten police reports, and producing a gruesome report of wartime death not on the battlefront but on the home front — because during the war, the home was no refuge. Take the case of Phyllis and Eileen Crocker, buried in a backyard, the murderer convicted by a jury after twenty minutes’ contemplation. Or the many victims who were refugees, including a single mother strangled in her bed by a serial killer.

The roll of death sometimes seemed endless: A five-year-old child murdered by her nurse. A woman killed by her husband and left in the basement of a bombed-out church. Story after story of creative burials — of the dead hidden in the ruins of abandoned structures. Creativity applied to courtroom defence arguments as well, including the fantastic claim that the body of what was clearly a murder victim was instead the corpse of a Victorian-era church parishioner, disinterred by the force of a blast. Nice try. The perpetrator was executed anyway.

Some Londoners chose suicide pacts, a kind of daily-double gambit to escape the rigours and heartbreak of the time. In one case, the surviving member of such a pact was convicted of murder under an 1821 law. King George VI intervened, issuing a statement that said, “We are graciously inclined to bestow Our grace and mercy on said Irene Louise Valeska Coffee and to pardon her in relation to said conviction on condition of life imprisonment.” Some months later, she was released. Then a quarter century passed and, not to be deterred by earlier failure, she attempted suicide again. With an overdose of amitriptyline, the second time did the trick.

There was, to be sure, some mirth in wartime London, and certainly there was a good deal of sexual activity, often to the strains of “Moonlight Serenade.” Indeed, when Glenn Miller, whose band arrived on RMS Queen Elizabeth, then a troopship, played the seductive jazz standard “In the Mood,” it was to audiences that were pretty much always in the mood. (I know this in part because my uncles Charlie and Sy Shribman were Miller’s agents.) There was plenty of opportunity for promiscuity and the violent passions that sex sometimes provokes.

This was a period when dance halls, clubs, cafés, brasseries, pubs, and theatres offered relief and comforting libations (the consumption of beer, albeit watered down, rose by a quarter). Along with the swing and sway, they also provided venues for mayhem and murder. A worker in the Coach and Horses pub in Covent Garden, for example, was slain in a botched robbery. A one-time club manager died in a knife fight, crying, “I am stabbed. I am stabbed. I am dying.”

Some of the crimes catalogued here were committed by servicemen against civilians (the serial killer Gordon Cummins was a member of the Royal Air Force, before he was hanged in 1942). One of the more salacious episodes centred on two Canadian soldiers, Henry Smith of British Columbia and George Frederick Brimacombe of Quebec, involved in a robbery and a gay encounter gone horribly wrong. They paid a relatively small price for their part, with Smith released and Brimacombe sentenced to three years in prison.

By the time the reader plows through these annals of abomination, London emerges as a slaughterhouse, a hellscape of homicide. Consider the naked pregnant woman tied in four sacks and deposited in the Thames, the infant left in a phone booth, the dead woman leaning against a stack pipe in the outside wall of a hotel, another wrapped in sacks and floating on the banks of the River Lea. There was frequently a racial element to these crimes. Although the murder buff (an oddly inappropriate term for this literary genus and species) may luxuriate in the gore, the squeamish may recoil in utter horror. At one point I began to plead: Enough! This was, of course, the war that produced the phrase “banality of evil,” though the London brand was unorganized, unsanctioned by authority, and eligible to be described as episodic rather than as part of an organized atrocity.

Toward the end of Under Cover of Darkness, Bell ceases her holiday as a crime writer and returns to her day job as a historian, by speaking of the London that the conflict created. “During the war, people lost their families, their neighbourhoods, their moorings,” she writes. “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.” London had changed and would change some more. But just as, in the words of another Vera Lynn song, there’ll always be an England, there’ll always be murder. It has been the favoured subject of English writers for decades and, we have seen, at least one Canadian academic.