UBC: Lefebure, Murder on the Home Front

[truepenny]

Murder on the Home Front: A True Story of Morgues, Murderers, and Mysteries During the London Blitz by Molly Lefebure

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Molly Lefebure was a remarkable woman. I just wish she'd let it show.

I'm giving Murder on the Home Front four stars for its value as a primary source about living in London during World War II. Lefebure captures vividly what it felt like to go through the Blitz, and about the sheer hell of carrying on with daily life in a city that was being destroyed around your ears. She's an excellent, engaging writer with occasional startlingly poetic turns of phrase.

But her persona. Oh dear god I wanted to drown her in a bucket. She is chipper and cozy, and she presents herself as a person with barely two thoughts to scrape together in her head, which a glance at her biography shows is manifestly untrue. And while she's being chipper and cozy in the foreground, her job, as secretary to Keith Simpson, would be fascinating if she'd let us see it.

She is not a true crime writer. She doesn't have the knack (and there is definitely a knack to it), and her focus is always just slightly off-center--or, conversely, my focus is slightly off-center. Despite the fabulous opening line: The murdered baby had been found in a small suitcase.: this is much more about living in London during World War II and happening to have an unusual job, replete with "characters" to provide anecdotes, than it is about, say, the practice of forensic pathology between 1941 and 1946. It is very decidedly a memoir.

So, fascinating book, just not quite in the way I wanted it to be.



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Comments

[sovay]

And while she's being chipper and cozy in the foreground, her job, as secretary to Keith Simpson, would be fascinating if she'd let us see it.

Do you have any idea why she presented herself in this way?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

(1) patriotism. The wartime British attitude of refusing to show that Hitler was getting to them permeates everything.

(2) defensive femininity. She was the first woman who had ever worked at Southwark mortuary, and I think the only woman who had ever regularly attended post-mortems. She spends a lot of time and energy trying to make herself appear harmless to Scotland Yard detectives and coroner's officers and constables and mortuary attendants. Her last chapter, where she gives up being Keith Simpson's secretary to get married and have children because she believes she can't have both--and her emphatic efforts to convince her readers, and herself, that it's exactly what she wants--I find very sad.

[sovay]

Her last chapter, where she gives up being Keith Simpson's secretary to get married and have children because she believes she can't have both--and her emphatic efforts to convince her readers, and herself, that it's exactly what she wants--I find very sad.

Thank you. The first had occurred to me as the feminine version of the stiff upper lip, but I didn't know she was the first woman in her field and therefore hadn't guessed the necessity of appearing fluffy and harmless. That sounds very painful to read for a whole bunch of reasons.

[carbonel]

Thanks. This sounds sufficiently interesting as a historical artifact that I've requested it from the library.