Saturday Snippet: Black Out

John Lawton has a fine eye for capturing war torn London. In Black Out the year is 1944 and the blitz is still lingering on. I reviewed the book ten days or so ago and I thought I'd share a passage from the book that might wet your appetite.

At the foot of Eros's pedestal two young women sat in shirtsleeves, daring all for spring sun, and shared a single cigarette.

He walked into Piccadilly, watching his shadow dance before him. In the brightness of such light the city contrasted sharply with the weather. London thawed. London budded. London ached. Like a muscle stretched and strained for too long it yearned to relax. The sense of action, the sense of an ending being almost tangible. Troy found himself wondering if the city would not expire with the forst breath of spring like some old man who had spent his energy enduring the depth of winter and had none left for the simple pleasures of living. What the sun revealed was a city of peeling, blistered paint, of broken, boarded-up windows, of shattered walls and open roofs, of four long years of make do and mend. It was a city scorched and scarred, patched and tattered in the light of spring.

I was also taken by this line:

'Of course war's an utter fucking picnic! Millions getting slaughtered for the benefit of the nostalgia of the survivors.'

Given the plethora of novels, TV series, documentaries and Hollywood movies that focus on the second world war, it's difficult to not think of them as a perverse nostalgia industry built on a mountain of dead bodies (even if some of them help us to think through why it happened and shocking waste of life, rather than simply providing entertainment).

I've already ordered the second book in the series, Old Flames, which moves forward to 1956. If its written with the same prose and eye for place I'm sure to enjoy.

Review of Black Out by John Lawton, Phoenix (1995)

London 1944, the tail end of the Blitz, and a human arm is discovered by children on a bomb site. The arm has been severed from its owner by a knife. The case is assigned to Detective Sergeant Troy, son of a Russian émigré turned newspaper magnate, and the rising star of the murder squad based in Scotland Yard. Troy soon establishes that Peter Wolinski, a Polish communist and intellectual, is missing from his apartment and starts a manhunt, only the victim appears to be German and there is no record as to his identity. Soon Troy is drawn into the world of wartime intelligence and is caught between two femme fatales – Tosca, a feisty New Yorker working for American High Command and Lady Diana Brack, the elegant lover of a shady American operative. Stonewalled by the intelligence services, when Troy refuses to give up the chase he becomes the hunted.

Black Out is one of a series of Troy novels that have been published out of chronological order. It’s the first one I’ve read and there was no sense that I needed to have read any of the others as the book stands alone. I found the first 100 pages or so a little frustrating. The story kind of ambled along and exploited a set of coincidences that I found very convenient and unlikely. For example (and revealing these will not spoil the read) – Wolinski, the man who disappears, lives in the apartment above Troy’s former mentor; Troy’s uncle, a university professor, also knows Wolinski; the woman who visits Wolinski’s apartment exits as Troy revisits his mentor; she is known to him as a family friend; Troy’s trusted constable also knows the woman as his brothers lust after her; the liaison between MI5 and the police attended the same school as Troy at the same time and is known to him; when Troy visits a RAF base he bumps into an old rival of his father. This is a big city, full of millions of people, and yet conveniently half a dozen principle characters are already known to each other and coincide in time and space. Perhaps one, maybe two, coincidences would have been realistic. But seven? And they were the ones I jotted down. In addition, Troy has remarkable luck – for example he’s the only survivor of a bomb explosion.

I almost stopped reading. I’m glad I didn’t as the story really picks up and the tension starts to mount and I ended up really enjoying the book. And there are some great twists towards the end. There was actually no need for these coincidences and the book would have worked equally well if the characters had been strangers. The characterisation is good throughout and I thought Kolankiewicz, the foulmouthed pathologist (‘fuck bloody off bastardpimpcopper’; ‘what the bollox you want, smartyarse’), and Tosca, the feisty New Yorker, were great creations. Lawton captures the atmosphere of black out London and the story eventually evolves into a convoluted and gripping tale.

Overall, despite a frustrating start, Black Out really grew on me, the latter half more than making up for the first, and I’ll keep an eye out for other Troy novels.

Thanks to Uriah Robinson at Crime Scraps for the recommendation. Another review can be found at It's a Crime