2006 mystery, first in Nadel's series about Francis Hancock, East End
undertaker during the Blitz. During an air raid, a man claims that
he's been stabbed, then runs off; later he shows up on Hancock's slab,
apparently dead of blast, but Hancock isn't satisfied.
This feels like the sort of book that would be written by a
person who's been brought up on tales of "Blitz spirit", and has then
gone and found some less-sanitised accounts of how people felt and
acted and wants to redress the balance. Everything and everyone here
is mean and dirty.
This starts with Hancock himself, who is not only half-Indian (not
that this seems to affect his personality at all except for the sort
of food his mum cooks, but it gives people an excuse to despise him)
but a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, so claustrophobic that
he can't bear to be indoors when a raid is happening and has to get
out and run; and he can't speak when this is going on, only stutter,
though he doesn't think of carrying a piece of paper to explain this
to people he meets. And the only brief personal happiness he can
find is with a local prostitute. One starts to feel that if he had a
dog, it would die just to spite him.
On the good side, he won't put up with this murder being dismissed as
an accident the way everyone else wants to, even when the victim turns
out to have been a horrible person; his family will miss him, but
nobody else seems to mind. (And people are being killed every night in
the bombings anyway.) Of course, it's not the relatively simple matter
that it appears to be, though the solution turns out to be very
straightforward and I'll be surprised if anyone doesn't guess it once
the relevant information has come to light.
That takes a while, because there's lots of trudging around
investigating and being miserable first. There's more death, and
digging into events everyone would rather have forgotten, and in the
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The physical confrontation at the climax of the book relies on someone
undergoing a total change of heart that has been entirely
unforeshadowed.
But it's not these technical failures that put me off from reading
more in the series, it's the sense of grim unrelenting unrewarded grot
with no hope in sight. I don't mind a bit of grim – I play Call of
Cthulhu – but I like the idea that one can make things a little
better for a while.
Followed by After the Mourning, but not by me.
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