Mixing noir stylings with an instinctive understanding of subcultures, Cathi Unsworth has been documenting the seedy side of London life since the release of her debut novel, The Not Knowing, in 2005. Drawing comparisons to the likes of Colin MacInnes and Derek Raymond, her work focuses on characters who inhabit the margins of society, and youth movements from the Swinging Sixties counterculture to punk. Her latest novel, Without The Moon (reviewed here), draws on the real life case of the'Blackout Ripper', who murdered four women during the Blitz. Here, Ms Unsworth talks about recreating historical events, historical violence against women, and the perfect drink to accompany her writing...
What drew you to the Second World War as a setting, and the story of the Blackout Ripper in particular?
As you know, I had written one book about a so-called Ripper before, Bad Penny Blues, which was also the first novel I’d written that was set in a time before I was born. While I had been researching that one, thematic links had come up with a couple of cases from the Forties. One was that of the ‘Blackout Ripper’, Gordon Cummins, a trainee RAF pilot who went on a murderous rampage over one week in 1942, killing four women and attempting to murder at least two more. The other was of the ‘Blitz Witch’, the medium Helen Duncan who in 1944 was tried at the Old Bailey under 17th century witchcraft laws, found guilty and sent to prison for ten months.
What I wanted to continue to investigate was: A: These periodic explosions of violence against women that are manifested in so-called Rippers and B: How society treats women during the times these crimes take place. I had learned from writing Bad Penny Blues how everything connects and goes on connecting: politics, privilege, planning, press, prostitution and pop. So I decided to follow the course of time backwards, an attempt to try and divine a source.
In the past, your novels have focussed on eras with a strong youth culture, whether that's the punk scene in The Singer, or the swinging sixties in Bad Penny Blues. We don't normally think of the early Forties in those terms, but did you find any parallels?
Plenty. I have always been very keen on the Forties novels of Patrick Hamilton, and thanks to my friends John King and Martin Knight at London Books, I had also been immersed in their series of reprints of lost Forties classics from the pens of Arthur La Bern, Gerald Kersh, James Curtis and Robert Westerby, whose novel Wide Boys Don’t Work introduced the slang expression for a dashing young criminal of the day to the world. These writers, and also Alexander Baron, Norman Collins and of course Graham Greene brought alive the worlds of the spieler, the Palais du Dance and the pintable arcade where London’s wide boys would congregate to chase after star-struck suburban girls. The War, as no less an expert than Mad Frankie Fraser himself acknowledged, was the best time to be a criminal, with the blackout and the black market providing all sorts of good livings for the pinstriped, Ronald Colman-moustachioed entrepreneur. The language contained in those books is so rich and evocative I have included a glossary in the back of Without The Moon, as I feel this forms a potted history of London’s police and thieves in itself.
I should also like to refer anyone interested in this period to this sterling website run by Paul Thompson and this page in particular. Here is where I found out more about cinematic depictions of these worlds. The greatest of them are Robert Hamer’s Ealing classic It Always Rains on Sunday and Alberto Calvalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive, which were both released in 1947. Other minor greats include Waterloo Road (1943), Appointment with Crime (1946), Dancing with Crime (1947) Good Time Girl (1948), Wide Boy (1950) and of course, the Bolting Brothers' classic adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1947). The stand-out spivs of the cycle are the young William Hartnell, Dickie Attenborough, Sydney Taffler and best of all to my mind, the marvellously malevolent Griffith Jones.
How strictly do you stick to documented facts when you are basing novels on real events, such as the Blackout Ripper or Jack the Stripper cases?
I have stuck to every known fact I can about the women in these cases, what their lives had been like up to the point that they had them taken away from them, how they were murdered, where and when, and what the police investigating the cases had to go on. In Without The Moon I have kept some of the original detectives who worked on the Cummins case and obviously I have been able to keep Cummins as he was caught. I morphed the real DCI Ted Greeno into my DCI Ted Greenaway because the real Greeno didn’t work on the second case in my novel, and also, because he was a major character, I wanted to invent my own backstory for him. Though he does share much in common with how the real Greeno looked and behaved – the Robert Mitchum eyes and the bottle of whisky in his murder bag, for instance. However, because the second half of the book concerns a murder that was not successfully prosecuted I have had to use my imagination more, the same as how I had to in Bad Penny to try and figure out a satisfactory identity, or perhaps I should say explanation for ‘Jack the Stripper’.
The most important thing for me is the women and I hope I do them justice. The second half of Without The Moon concerns a woman called Margaret McArthur who was murdered on Waterloo Bridge only days after Cummins was caught, in a fashion very similar to Cummins’ MO, and on the face of it, by another Allied serviceman. The police had their suspect and seemingly strong evidence against him but the jury acquitted the accused, a Canadian solider. From the very few facts known about Margaret and her presumed attacker I had to build up a big backstory for both of them that further connected with Greenaway of the first half of the book. But, that’s why it’s called fiction after all – at a certain point you have to put down your research and do some detective work from your own imagination, knowledge and history.
A historian called Nick Pelling gave me the materials on Margaret McArthur because he could not trace the Canadian after WWII and therefore couldn’t write the book he was intending on the case. He trusted me to do something good with it because he liked Bad Penny Blues. Both of us were slightly amazed when, a few days after publication, a 91-year-old man from Canada confessed to the murder of a woman in Soho in the Forties. It wasn’t the same man but the circumstances were eerily similar – and his victim was also called Margaret.
How do you go about recreating the lives of marginalised figures like the gangsters and sex workers who populate Without the Moon? Are there any particularly useful sources you use?
All of the books and films mentioned above, plus some good history books, the very best of which was Donald Thomas’ peerless An Underworld At War (John Murray, 2003), which is the most authoritative and comprehensive book on the subject of criminals, deserters, spivs, racketeers, police, press and civilians in WWII, and how these various factions interconnected, all written like hardboiled noir. The best book I read about working girls in the Forties was a memoir called West End Girls by Barbara Tate (Orion 2010), an artist who had worked as a prostitute’s maid during that time and whose stories were so funny and beautifully written that the women seemed to just step off the page, stub their fags out in my ashtrays and proclaim: “I should bleedin’ cocoa.” Sadly Barbara Tate died not long after this book was published, she is someone I would have loved to have met. Similarly, Joan Wyndham, whose Love Lessons and Love is Blue are wonderful depictions of a young artistic girl’s progress through the War from Chelsea to the WRAF, taken from the diaries she kept at the time. I hadn’t realised that Joan was good friends with my noir hero Derek Raymond until I mentioned these books to John Williams, his literary executor and my editor, who then showed me some correspondence between them – I love it when connections like that are made.
The National Archive at Kew for the police records and various newspaper libraries are always good for rummaging through – you can get a lot not just from the stories in the papers but the ads that are running alongside them to know what brands of cigarettes, shoes, drink, etc, are appropriate to use. And the music of this era is the best of any novel I have ever written – ironic that the darkest days of racial intolerance, genocide and warfare were illuminated by the sublime sounds of swing, made by the very people Hitler most wanted to destroy – the Jewish people, black people, homosexuals and intellectuals of every stripe, who were very often, all working together.
Writing a historical novel is a bit like method acting – you immerse yourself in the time period with all the materials you can until you feel you are ‘there’. And I have spoken to proper historians who say the same thing – it is the music and popular fiction of an era that will bring it back to you, more strongly than any historical record. I have found this to be the case and it’s one of the reasons why writing about our recent past has become so addictive to me.
What record and drink would you recommend to set the mood for reading Without the Moon?
There were two tragic big band leaders based in London who both died in the Blitz. Al Bowlly, who was too tired to go down to the air raid shelter following a gig and was found dead in his Soho room after a nearby bomb blast sucked all the air out of it; and Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, who died onstage at the Café du Paris during an air raid in 1941 and – according to a Fortean Times report – whose ghost continued to haunt the building when it reopened in the 1990s. Both of these very handsome men were apparently untouched in death and looked as if they were only sleeping. Therefore, I think I would have to call upon Al and Snakehips to lead us back down the time tunnel – and there is one CD compilation called The Al Bowlly Collection 1927-1940 on which Al appears singing with Snakehips and his West Indian Orchestra. So I would pick that as my record and a pink gin as the sort of drink the girls in my book would raise with the words: “Here’s luck!” on their lips.
What's your writing routine like? Do you have daily targets? What sort of environment do you like to work in?
I have one day a week to write in, on the other four I work flat out as a sub-editor on four different magazines in order to afford to be able to keep living in London. So I have to make every second of that day count. I probably spend about a year researching and plotting a book, then another year writing it. I try and spend half-an-hour or so on writing on the days I am at work so as to keep the thread going, but often times I am too tired and brain dead. I can write in pretty much any environment, thanks to having been a music journalist I think, but I prefer my front room, where all my books and records are. I must say, I am deeply envious of you being a workshy fop – how do you manage to pull that off?
Who are your favourite contemporary writers?
James Ellroy, David Peace, Jake Arnott, Lydia Lunch, Paul Willetts, Donald Thomas, John L Williams, Des Barry, Iain Sinclair, Elizabeth Wilson, Christopher Fowler, Max Décharné, Stewart Home, Ken Worple, Joolz Denby, John King, Peter Ackroyd, Tom Benn, Anna Whitwham, Travis Elborough, Syd Moore, Ken Hollings, the poet Benedict Newbery and about a million more I will suddenly remember as soon as I’ve sent this off.
What are you working on next?
A book that follows on from Without The Moon, which will chiefly be concerned with the trail of Helen Duncan and another strange ‘witch’ case from the Forties that is not so well known about. It will involve several but not all of the leading characters from Without The Moon. I have discovered a rich well of people to draw from during this period and my aim now is to try and write a series that links up to Bad Penny Blues in 1959 – should keep me busy for about the next ten years, God willing…
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