Dark City: murder, vice and mayhem in wartime London by Simon Read
First published 2010, this History Press paperback edition is from 2019. The cover shows a narrow cobbled street at night, with a black cat silhouetted against a background of searchlights and St. Paul’s Cathedral illuminated by incendiary bomb fires. It’s a fanciful image that is perhaps warning enough that this isn’t going to be a straightforward history book.
It does instead read like a True Crime book. I’m not a huge fan of True Crime, especially in the well-worn territory of men kidnapping, raping, and murdering women. That said, this is well-researched, but does tend to give us thought processes and dialogue which has clearly been invented, based on police reports, confessions, and so on.
This book is mainly about murder, and it’s especially interested in serial killers. Which means three people in the main—triple named in their notoriety: Gordon Frederick Cummins, the Blackout Ripper; John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer; and John Reginald Christie, of 10 Rillington Place.
There are others, but these are the main three. And both Haigh and Christie continued their killings after the war. Haigh was arrested and executed in 1949 and Christie in 1953.
Simon Read tries to bring these crimes to life by putting you in the room, but the impression you come away with is of the banality of evil, and how strikingly similar they all were, give or take a few details. Cummins strangled and mutilated, Haigh used a pistol, and Christie used a mixture of strangulation and town gas. But they all did a thing (the murder) and then another thing (to the body), and all three were inadequate men who took advantage of vulnerable and naive people and overstretched police forces.
All three were horrific, but Christie’s story is probably the one that makes you cringe the most, simply because of the squalor and seediness. Behind these crimes is a social history of dingy flats, damp houses, and abandoned workshops. Buildings not fit for purpose, unused, disregarded—except by these individuals. Seedy, slimy, nasty.
And it is the social background, in the end, that interests me, more than the repetitive and sick pathologies of the killers. It’s the runaways, the itinerants, the lost. The wives who ran away from older husbands, harsh lives on farms, failed marriages entered into in haste and regretted. And what do they do? They go on the game, and live precarious existences between seedy flat and knocking shop. Dingy cafés, pubs, clubs. Men in uniform, some of them deserters, and men in grubby woollen suits, living their own version of a precarious lifestyle and taking advantage of insufficient background checks. Deserters, losers, failures: as Stieg Larsson put it in his original title, Men Who Hate Women.
Why would a woman who was waiting for her date just wander off into a dark alleyway with a stranger who chatted her up? That’s really interesting: not for the purpose of victim-blaming, but for that sense of the atmosphere in wartime London. A loosening of social bonds, a relaxing of inhibitions. The uniforms might have made a difference: that sense that all men were the same, that they were perhaps serving their country and therefore somehow safe? Or simply the excitement of the night, and the dark, and the risk, and the attractive (and insistent) stranger, and the ever present threat from the skies. Live while you can, love who you can.
I’ve got another book on the same subject, which will be an interesting comparison to this: Under Cover of Darkness by Amy Helen Bell. That one is from Yale University Press, and I suspect is both much more a history text, but also more focused on victims than on killers. Watch this space.
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Dr. Amy H. Sturgis 📖
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