UBC: Dawson, Death in the Air

[truepenny]

Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City by Kate Winkler Dawson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a pretty good book about the lethal London fog of 1952 (estimated 12,000 deaths attributable to the fog and, no, I did not mistype that) welded to an okay-ish book about the serial killer John Reginald Christie in that structure that's become so popular lately of "Phenomenon A + Murderer B = Book C." This can work well, and I've seen it done, but not in this book. There's no particular connection between Christie and the fog except that he was living in London in 1952. He did not kill anyone during the fog; he did not pick his victims based on some weird fog criterion. He suffocated, or partially suffocated, some of them with coal gas, but as a connection between him and the deadly London particulars, that's pretty weak. Dawson doesn't really have any new insights to offer into Christie or his murders or his horrible habit of keeping his victims close to him (under the floorboards, in the garden, in a plastered over cupboard), and while I thought what she had to say about the fog--and about the way that the Conservative government dealt (badly) with the fog and the inconvenient implications of the fog (air pollution kills people! oh dear)--was interesting, it was weakened by being one of two foci of attention instead of being alone at center stage.

I also personally dislike the structure of "find Everypersons X, Y, and Z and follow them through Phenomenon A and its aftermath." Again, it can be done well, but it's too easy to do, not even badly, but mediocre-ly, and Dawson certainly doesn't do it much better than mediocre-ly. Her Everypersons don't connect with each other, they don't connect with the government, they don't connect with Christie. If you're going to try to write a book using an artificial structure, go big or go home. Find ways to make your assemblage into a story, or what's the use of making the assemblage in the first place?

I think, although I admit I am not sure, that Dawson was primarily interested in the fog and saw Christie as a way to make the book more marketable, because that's what serial killers do for popular history. I, of course, was primarily interested in Christie (although boy howdy did I learn a lot about London fogs, which is not irrelevant to anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes), and if you're writing about Christie as Murderer B, your best Phenomenon A is the death penalty, since the vexed and unanswerable question of Tim Evans' guilt or innocence has a lot to do with why there is no death penalty in Britain any more. Were there two murderers living at 10 Rillington Place? It seems so unlikely, and yet the deaths of Beryl and Geraldine Evans don't fit Christie's pattern. He raped and murdered women he brought home from pubs, not his neighbor and her little girl. And Tim Evans himself manifestly and literally could not tell the truth to save his life. None of his versions of what happened to Beryl and Geraldine makes sense. And Christie's versions aren't any better.

I think it's more likely than not that Tim Evans murdered his wife and daughter and it's just a ghastly coincidence that he was living upstairs from a serial killer at the time. But I don't know.

So this was an interesting book, and certainly not a bad book, but it could have been a much better book if it had been about either the fog or the serial killer.



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