"The Fortune Men" by Nadifa Mohamed

In 1952, Tiger Bay in Swansea is a melting pot of different nationalities; there are tensions between the indigenous white community and those they describe as 'black'. Somali Mahmood Mattan has married a white woman and fathered three sons but now, unemployed and a gambler with a criminal record for petty theft, he is separated. So, when local shopkeeper and money-lender Violet is found murdered, the police arrest Mahmood. This novel, based on a real case, and told in the present tense, mostly from the third-person perspective of Mahmood, chronicles what happens next.

It is beautifully written and explores Mahmood's life growing up in what was the British Somaliland and later became a merchant seaman, working in the engine room and travelling all over the world, before settling in Tiger Bay. The descriptions of the multi-cultural communities in Tiger Bay is also fascinating.

I found it a little slow at the beginning but towards the end I was page-turningly desperate to find out what happened. 

My only criticism is, as regular readers of this blog will guess, the use of foreign words. Use them, please, to give colour and authenticity. But offer translations as footnotes or a glossary.

The book was shortlisted for the both Booker Prize and the Costa award in 2021. Other Booker shortlisted novels, many reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Talking to the dregs of society. Knowing their habits better than they do. Holding your dinner down when confronted with their bestial acts, that's the knack to this job." (Ch 5)
• "She savours these moments first thing, before the past, present and future have solidified, when time feels timeless and screeching seagulls have safely navigated her from dreams of soundless wailing." (Ch 6)
• "The macalim [teacher] taught Mahmood that becoming a man was like turning wood into charcoal: a process of destruction until something pure and fiercely incandescent emerged." (Ch 7)
• "This didn't have to be the sum total of his life: this vista, this horizon, this language, these rules, these taboos, this food, these women, these laws, these neighbours. these enemies." (Ch 7)
• "One second he can understand everything, then they change frequency, like a fuzzy radio, and go into their university talk, leaving him with only isolated words to hold on to." (Ch 9)
• "They think a man stupid because he talks with an accent, but he wants to shout, 'I teach myself five languages, I know how to say "fuck you!" in Hindi and "love me" in Swahili'." (Ch 9)
• "In the touch of her hands they felt love, while he sensed pollution, in her laughter he heard betrayal, while they saw pleasure, in the distant gaze that he read as slyness, they perceived sadness." (Ch 10)
• "She was a tree that he wanted to chop down, and he used the law as his axe." (Ch 10)
• "'Yallah! Yallah! [O God] No way to put out the fire but to burn it!' Those were words to live by." (Ch 11)

September 2022; 370 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Croydon Arsenic Mystery" by Diane Janes

On 5th March 1929, in South Croydon, Violet Sidney died. Analysis of her remains suggested arsenic poisoning. Given that her daughter, Vera, had died a few months before and her other daughter Grace's husband shortly before that, their corpses were exhumed and found to contain arsenic. The suspects included the cook, the doctor (who was rumoured to fancy the widowed Grace), the Grace herself, and the son, Tom. It was a classic middle class murder mystery.

But was it? Although eminent forensic scientist Sir Bernard Spilsbury convinced the coroner that arsenic was involved in all three deaths and although Inspector Hedges, the local flat foot, was convinced of Grace's guilt, the police never prosecuted anyone.

Ms Janes follows the twists and turns of this case, through three inquests which sometimes threatened to slip from the coroner's control, through the brow-beating of suspects in a scarily biassed investigation, and through details of a forensic science that was still in its infancy. She castigates the police and the expert witnesses as asserting much much more than they could possibly prove, she shows how one of the analysts added his numbers up wrongly in a document that was provided to the court and never challenged, and she suggests her own unique solution.

She is certainly thorough. This is rather at the expense of clarity. There were so many assertions and challenges during the inquests, which were interleaved in time, that it becomes extremely confusing for the general reader. Much of the first two thirds of the book is devoted to a narrative reconstructing these details. But the book itself only comes alive when she shows how the evidence is flawed and when she looks at each death separately from a more modern perspective. When she sweeps aside the irrelevancies of description, the solutions she proposes become highly probable.

If she had restricted herself to the explanation part of the book it might have been a lot shorter but it would have been a great deal better. October 2015; 195 pages

"Satan's Circus" by Mike Dash

Satan's Circus was the nickname for an area of Manhattan just west of Broadway where gambling dens and brothels flourished in the years leading up to the First World War. Local politicians and the policemen they appointed ran protection rackets which grew fat on the ill-gotten gains of these businesses. Corruption was rife and to be a 'grafter' didn't mean you worked hard, it meant you took bribes.

Herman Rosenthal was a small time crook who ran remarkably unsuccessful illegal gambling dens. Convinced that his long run of bad luck came from his rivals tipping off the police, he decided to blow the whistle and contacted a journalist. His associates attempted to bribe him to leave town but when he refused they became convinced they would have to silence him more permanently. Despite realising he was being followed and being considerably frightened, he persisted and spilled the beans in two long newspaper articles. Shortly afterwards he was gunned down outside a hotel by four gunmen who escaped on the running board of their getaway taxi. The taxi was soon discovered and the men captured. It was then a matter of finding out who was Mr Big behind the plan by the time-honoured American way of offering immunity to some in order to persuade them to testify against their confederates. In this way the District Attorney constructed a case against a corrupt cop called Charley Becker. With the help of a remarkably biassed trial judge and despite a strong of unconvincing witnesses (including the memorable Bald Jack Rose who was completely hairless and had a face that was exactly like that of a vampire), and despite a successful appeal leading to a retrial, another conviction and a second, unsuccessful appeal, Becker died in the electric chair.

This is an exciting, if squalid story. The author does his best with a large cast of characters but it is not always easy to follow who did what (the murder was carried out by four gunmen, at least four other criminals were involved in organising it, there was also the taxi driver and the taxi owner, there were a strong of other related criminals and then there are the police and the lawyers and all the families of all the men). There are some wonderful nicknames (eg Gyp the Blood) and it certainly served as the inspiration for at least some of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls although this was the era just before prohibition and the rise of the famous New York gangsters such as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schulz.

The epilogue traces the subsequent careers of the low lifes mentioned on these pages. Arnold Rothstein (who was celebrated in fiction as The Brain in Guys and Dolls and Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby) was the man who fixed the 1919 World Baseball Series; he was shot dead in 1928. Winfield Sheehan who may have been involved with a corrupt Gambling Commission for Tammany Hall became a movie producer and discovered Rita Hayworth and John Wayne. And Charlie Becker's son became a professor of Sociology.

This was a fascinating book, lifting the lid on an underworld whilst managing to remind us always of the precarious and seedy existences the criminals led. The conviction of the policeman was clearly a travesty of justice but on the other hand he had accumulated a remarkable amount of graft in a very short time so he wasn't a nice man. Nevertheless, the description of his electrocution is horrendous.

Great reading. October 2015; 354 pages

"Dead Reckoning" by Caitlin Rother

True crime: in a plan masterminded by his wife Jennifer, ex-child actor Skylar Deleon and two accomplices board a boat, force the retired couple who own and sail it to give them power of attorney over all their assets, and then tie them to the anchor and dump them overboard.

This is a classic of American journalism. Obsessive about detailing every single character in the drama, we know the religious convictions of the detectives and the military background of the judge. I adore this sort of reportage. My favourite example is probably All the President's Men, the Bernstein and Woodward classic about Watergate, in which we learn what the reporters eat when they meet with the owner of the Washington Post. This captures a real flavour of my (probably inaccurate) perspective of what it is to be a citizen of the USA: churches and food and money and health and things and things and things.

And this does seem scary. Life in the beautiful state of California does seem to be a perpetual struggle. Honest people seem to work so hard (often at more than one job) for very little pay. Medical bills can easily tip them over the edge. Skylar and Jennifer wanted the good life so they rapidly ran up credit card bills and took out loans from banks and family members which they had no hope whatsoever of repaying. At the same time, it was easy to earn tens of thousands of dollars from drugs or by persuading the gullible to part with inheritances and savings as 'investments' (and then to kill them.

And violence is never very far away. When Skylar needs some muscle for his murderous plot he arranges it through a contact. He meets the muscle (a gang member bizarrely named John F Kennedy who is studying to become a pastor) in a car park and persuades him there and then to join in. The man gets $1300. The notary who illegally notarizes the power of attorneys gets more (she is a sad case of a woman who knows she is doing something dodgy but is tempted by the bucks well over her head).

When you think about it, this is a deeply disturbing portrait of a society in which a prosperous elite is perpetually threatened by a dysfunctional underclass.

Most of these criminals are weak and stupid. Alonso is a poorly paid prison guard who falls under the influence of Skylar. He then vacillates between working all hours for good money and working long hours for poor money. Finally he joins Skylar on the boat on the fateful day. Sickened by what has happened, he runs away to Mexico but then voluntarily returns to testify, for which he gets a reduced sentence of twenty years.

But you cannot believe that Skylar and Jennifer ever thought they would get away with the crime. They used their cell phones to talk to one another throughout the day and the cell phone masts tracked where Skylar was. The power of attorney plan was botched and almost deliberately designed to throw suspicion on these two to whom, apparently, the victims had given complete control over their finances.

Incredible! But a rattling good read. January 2015; 474 pages

"The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams" by Jane Robins

Four star: potentially my favourite true crime book of 2014; definitely will be on the short list.

John Bodkin Adams practised medicine in Eastbourne; he was particularly solicitous of old ladies. Many of them died under his care, often after he had prescribed for them huge amounts of morphine, heroin and barbiturates. Many left him money or possessions; he liked posh cars and he was particularly greedy and avaricious for 'mementoes' such as gold pencils that he picked up even while the patient was still alive. 42% of those died of 'cerebral thrombosis' according to his death certificates (three times the expected average of about 14%). Was he a mass murderer?

Jane Robins presents the evidence and charts the history of the police investigation, at the end of which we are left in little doubt that he was guilty. Then she describes the trial and new evidence comes to light. Was Adams killing for gain or was it euthanasia? Or was he simply trying to ease suffering without properly calculating that the effect of his treatment might be to shorten life?

This is a true crime as exciting as any whodunnit and the final result is in doubt until almost the very end.

Riveting. January 2014; 284 pages

"Mr Briggs' hat" by Kaye Colquhon

This tale of Britain's first railway murder in Victorian London in 1864 is a true whodunnit. The facts are meticulously detailed. Senior bank clerk Thomas Briggs enters a single railway compartment at Fenchurch Street. He is seen when the train arrives at Bow Station in the carriage in the company of two men. His unconscious and dying body is found on the track between Bow and Hackney Wick, four minutes away. At the next stop, Hackney, two clerks from the same bank enter the compartment to find it full of blood. Briggs' stick and bag are in the compartment and a battered hat. But the hat is not his.

Within a few days a jeweller describes a man exchanging a gold chain which is found to be the one missing from Mr Briggs. Following the publication of a reward a heavily indebted cabbie puts an acquaintance, a German tailor called Franz Muller, firmly in the frame as prime suspect when he describes his friend's new hat. But Muller has sailed for New York. The police pursue him in a steamship which, thanks to contrary winds, arrives long before the sailing ship. Despite the American Civil War and the need to travel to Washington which has  recently been surrounded by Confederate armies the police extradite Muller and bring him back to London to stand trial. But did he do it?

There is yards of circumstantial evidence: the watch chain, the hat, the watch itself. But there is also an alibi. And the police suppress evidence of the two men seen sitting with Briggs in the carriage, neither of whom fit Muller's description.

Will Muller be convicted? Will he hang? And if he didn't do it, who did? Was it cabbie Matthews who subsequently sought to incriminate his friend? Was it the unknown man who had threatened Briggs over a loan?

This is a desperately exciting whodunnit brilliantly written. January 2013; 286 pages.

"The magnificent Spilsbury and the case of the brides in the bath" by Jane Robins

Everyone, a Orwell pointed out, loves a murder. This book tells of one of the classics: George Smith whose modus operandi was to marry a woman, insure her life, steal her savings and then drown her in her bath. He got away with it three times under three different names in three different seaside towns getting three inquests to declare three misadventures before the father of one of his victims read in the newspapers about another case and recognised too many similarities for coincidence. Nevertheless there might have been an acquittal. Forensics was still in its infancy as a science and the corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition when they were eventually exhumed. But the brilliant pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, whose evidence had helped convict Dr Crippen, showed that it would be possible to forcibly drown a woman in a bath with no conclusive marks left on the body and without a struggle.

This delightful and readable book oscillates between a chapter describing another victim and a chapter describing Spilsbury's early career before clamaxing in the trial scene.

Good fun. January 2013; 246 pages.

"The Invention of Murder" by Judith Flanders

A thoroughly enjoyable book.

Flanders trawls through the famous and not-so-famous murders of the 1800s and shows how they provided fodder for the broadsheet and newspaper business, and for the writers of melodramas and novels. We discover that the hunger for a story led journalists then as well as now to downright lies, inventions and deceit. The Times especially never let truth stand in the way of a good story.

She shows how playwrights and novelists embroidered real details of sordid crimes into their work. She introduced me to a vast array of melodramas I had never heard of before. She shows how Dracula, written two years after Jack the Ripper, incorporates many elements of the Ripper crimes into the text. She traces the antecedents of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone and of Inspector Bucket in Dickens' Bleak House. This aspect of the book reminded me of James Shapiro's 1599 which similarly showed how events surrounding Shakespeare in 1599 provided the material for the plays he wrote in that year. What impressed me was how thin a line there is between cheap sensationalist fiction and works of art. Dickens (who loved a good murder) frequently crosses the border into melodrama. Perhaps the difference is simply in the quality of his prose, as revealed to me in The Haunted House where the stories contributed by Dickens, Collins and Mrs Gaskell are simply better written than those contributed by the other, now less well-known, writers. Quality tells in the end.

She is also remorseless in her evidence that the lower classes received a much lower standard of justice than the upper classes: judges were biased against the poor, they could not afford counsel (and in many trials they only ever got to speak in their own defence because there were not defence witnesses), and all-male, all-bourgeois jurors equated respectable prosperity with honesty. Most killers were desperate. "Helen Blackwood, a Glasgow prostitute, shared a room measuring eight feet by six feet four inches with her lover, two other prostitutes who stayed there intermittently and two homeless boys, aged nine and eleven, whom she let sleep under her bed. This was reality."

There are moments when laws were changed. She shows how the mass spectacle of public execution became abhorrent to many (especially since so many murderers were pathetic rather than evil and especially since so many hangmen were incompetent) and changed to 'private' executions inside the prison (which then hoisted a black flag). And there is the wonderful moment when Thornton, having been acquitted of murdering the woman he had sex with and having the charge of rape dropped (because the complainant is dead) is rearrested for 'appeal of murder' which was a type of private prosecution brought by the bereaved family. "When called upon to answer, whether guilty or not guilty, Thornton .... took a pair of gauntlets, put one on, throwing the other on the floor" thus challenging the complainant [who was only a boy] to Trial by Battle. He got off the third trial and emigrated to America, leading a blameless life thereafter.

There are moments of humour. One murderer called Palmer was known as the 'Rugeley Poisoner'. The good people of Rugeley applied to the Prime Minister to change the name of their town; he agreed on condition that they named it after himself, Palmerston.

It is a rollicking good read but it is made even more special by her deliciously dry sense of humour shown in numerous asides of which these are but a few:

• "Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fiction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel's dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester's previous marriage in a letter."
• "... a plot so confusing there is no real resolution  because, I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened and understandably did not want to read it over again."
• "... a notorious Secret Intelligence Office .... is so secret that the office has a brass plaque on the door: 'Secret Agent' it reads."
• A story has a swallowed suicide note discovered at post-mortem: "This may trump Paul Ferroll's confession left in his wife's grace for 'least likely place to leave a confession'."
• In another melodrama a female detective indulges "in that passion of all stage detectives, disguise, appearing as a nurse, a man and an Irish lad, as well as changing her frock (which fools everyone)."
• "The Daily News merely reported Martha Tabram's death as a 'supposed murder in Whitechapel' - which since the woman had been stabbed more than three dozen times seems to stretch the meaning of the word 'supposed' past breaking point."
• "The Times solemnly reported that the police were taking 'extra precautions': if they heard 'any cry of distress, such as 'Help', 'Murder' or 'Police', they are to hasten to the spot at once'. "What, one wonders, had their instructions been before?)

A fantastic book.

February 2012; 466 pages

"The Devil and Sherlock Holmes" by David Grann

Twelve real-life stories of murder, mystery and madness. Sort of. Actually a remarkably eclectic collection which makes one wonder how one man, albeit writing for The New Yorker, can have found the time and sources to acquire such a miscellany. Even the title stores are as different as chalk and cheese: a 'was he killed or did he commit suicide?' puzzle about the wannabe biographer of Conan Doyle to an assortment of interviews with and biographical fragments of an exiled Haitian politician. In between we learn about an arson that wasn't and a criminal gang that terrorises US penitentiaries. My favourite story is the murderer who used the details of his unsolved crime as material for a bizarrely surrealist novel; this led to his eventual conviction.

A fascinating and unusual collection of articles.

September 2011; 334 pages