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You might imagine that the Blitz would have provided enough death and destruction to satisfy the most blood-thirsty of sociopaths, but in actual fact, the opposite appears to be true. London experienced a noticeable uptick in crime during the war years. Worse, London was stalked by an unusually active serial killer just a few months after the major bombing campaign ended. Over six days, Gordon Cummins, a trainee RAF pilot, killed and mutilated four women and attacked two more in February, 1942 before he was apprehended. Oddly, while Cummins was safely locked away, another woman was killed, possibly by a Canadian soldier, in circumstances reminiscent of Cummins' activities.
As she did in a previous novel, BAD PENNY BLUES, Cathi Unsworth draws upon history for the armature of her noir novel. She retains the real name of the killer, but his victims' names and their backstories are the product of Unsworth's imagination. DCI Ted Greenaway of the novel is a fictional construction based to some degree on one of the detectives involved in the Cummins case. Unsworth also imports another notable, if minor court case of the period, the conviction of Helen Duncan, the "Blitz Witch," one of the last mediums to be charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. The Duncan affair gives her the opportunity to resurrect a sadly forgotten figure, Hannen Swaffer, "the pope of Fleet Street," who was simultaneously a Spiritualist, a socialist, and Britain's most popular journalist.
Unsworth says in an afterword that she views her approach to this material as rendering events as if they took place in a parallel universe. This may be so, but the border between the universes is permeable. She is extremely effective in creating the atmosphere of London in the years of the blackout - edgy, uncertain, frantic at times, deprived of much, and ultimately exhausting. The lights seem never to be lit in WITHOUT THE MOON, a title drawn from an Irving Berlin lyric:
Soon,
We'll be without the moon,
Humming a different tune,
And then...
lyrics that seem almost eerily prescient, written as they were in 1936 and predicting bad things to come.
The author is equally accomplished in providing those details of life, speech, and habit that identify the women who were Cummins' prey and lift them from the status of all but anonymous victims to actual women who deserved far better than they got. She reminds us of the sisterhood that linked the women who made a living on the dark London streets and the terribly constrained life choices that confronted unprivileged married women of the time.
Gordon Cummins was unusually ferocious, even for a serial killer. His killing spree lasted just six days and Unsworth devotes relatively little space to any sort of explanation of what might have made him what he was. Happily, the London police were also quick to find and arrest him. DCI Greenaway had made promises to the friends of the victims and he was bound to keep them.
While Cummins was awaiting trial (which came about swiftly in those days), yet one more woman was discovered murdered in the vicinity of Waterloo Bridge, which was still under construction despite the Blitz and the continuing threat of bombardment. A Canadian soldier, whose real name was Muldoon, was arrested and tried for this murder and found not guilty, despite some considerable evidence to the contrary. What happened to him, where he went, whether he committed other crimes or was indeed innocent as found, all is lost to history. Unsworth revives him, gives him a new name and provides a provocative explanation both for why he was acquitted and why he has disappeared so absolutely from the historical record. In the process, she raises some intriguing questions about the interrelation between the forces of law and order and the criminal classes, questions that are presumably still relevant.
Unsworth's concern throughout is less with mystery - the prologue reveals the judicial outcome of both trials - than on the messy decay of structure that began with the Blitz and the continuing war did nothing to reverse. It is a thoroughly absorbing venture into a past where Londoners were stretched to their breaking point and order threatened to disappear. No wonder the trained killers, the soldiers, who, in Greenaway's words, "used their skills not against the enemy but on the easiest of prey - the women who worked London's streets," had no apparent difficulty traversing the moral ground from legally sanctioned killing to murder.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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