Book review: Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth
Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth
A vivid evocation of time and place that maintains a threatening presence with the turn of every page, Cathi Unsworth’s third novel confirms her place as the first lady of noir fiction.
The book centres on the true story of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of the 1960s in which the bodies of eight working girls were found in or along the Thames.
The killings sparked the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history, but the fiend was never found. Cathi aims not to solve the mystery, but rather, as she puts it, to “create a parallel universe in which an explanation can be offered that ties together a series of intriguing coincidences uncovered during the course of research.”
She certainly succeeds in doing so, rooting her tale on her home turf of Notting Hill, where five of the victims lived, and drawing the reader into a 1960s London of gangsters and bohemians, fascists and Teds, lords, ladies and occult dabblings without ever resorting to the clichés that so often plague books about this fertile time for storytelling.
Like all the best crime books, Bad Penny Blues is far more than a macabre indulgence in gore and suffering. Cathi examines what crime does to people, and why people commit the kinds of acts that challenge our notions of humanity. She also understands that the best crime fiction can tell us much about society, and her portrayal of the mixture of moral churn and new opportunity that marked a society on the cusp of change helps to anchor her tale so firmly in those heady days.
Cathi says she wanted to “take these women’s lives and horrible deaths seriously, to give each one of them a voice that was denied them and not denigrate them for what they had to do for money” and she displays an empathy for the victims of crime that runs through each one of her three novels to date. But she also shines a light on class relations, on power and on the grubby compromises that have built modern Britain, making an eloquent political statement without ever resorting to polemic.
If you want heroes and villains, clear lines and easy answers, this complex but immensely readable and convincing fiction is not for you. This is not only a fine crime yarn to place alongside the best of James Ellroy, but an homage to London every bit as sharp and readable as Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm.
David Peace has called this book “the English The Black Dahlia“, and it’s no empty hype. A true classic of its type, make sure Bad Penny Blues turns up on your reading list.
Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth is published by Serpent’s Tail (RRP £7.99) on December 3rd 2009 and is available from Amazon
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