London in the 1950s was briefly home to Marilyn Monroe, shooting The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. Crowds lined the streets for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and flocked to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank and the first performances of The Mousetrap in the West End. The city had its glamour, but it was a pale shadow of the cultural powerhouse it would become in the Swinging Sixties. There was a seediness to it, with war bomb damage still visible in the streets and the last of the dangerous ‘pea souper’ fogs, until the Clean Air Act was passed in 1956.
Setting my fourth crime novel in 1957, I wanted the time and place to feel as authentic as possible. For the location, I chose the street containing Agatha Christie’s mews house in Chelsea, the setting for Murder in the Mews. The crime scene in my fictional mews house involves a call girl and her client. My research inevitably took me to the real murders that took place in central London, and three cases encapsulated the period for me.
These were: the serial killer, the stalker and the unknown assailant. All the victims were women and all, in some way, illustrated the themes that were on my mind at the time, namely, the lack of justice for women, and the contrast between the courage that was asked of them during the war, and the small, domestic lives they were expected to lead after it.
The first case is the most famous: that of 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. This was fifty years before Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The case tends to be known by the address because two different men were hanged for murders that took place there. First, Timothy Evans, was convicted of murdering his wife and baby daughter in 1950, largely on the evidence of the main prosecution witness, his downstairs neighbour, John Christie. The police trusted Christie in part because he had once worked as a reserve constable, even though he had a criminal record. However, when Christie moved out of his flat in 1953, the police discovered the bodies of six women there, including his wife. Four of them had been gassed, strangled, raped and murdered. The other two were skeletons, but had probably been killed the same way. Needless to say, Christie almost certainly killed Evans’s wife and daughter, too.
Although Christie knew the women in various ways, none of their disappearances had been investigated hard enough to lead to him, until the new tenant in his flat found a false wall in a kitchen alcove, where three of the bodies had been hidden.
I honestly believe the police did their best, given their prejudices at the time. The officers in my novel aren’t idiots or misogynists. They work hard to get to the truth. But they tend not to take the word of callgirls seriously, and they’re reluctant to follow up when one of their number is accused of molesting them. It’s not that they don’t believe the women, exactly, but they’re sure a stern word in the right ear will fix the problem. I’d love to think how far we’ve come in sixty-five years … but, as recent cases regarding Met Police officers show, there’s still a long way to go.
The second case involves the death of a woman called Christine Granville, who was stabbed to death by her stalker in the lobby of a cheap Kensington hotel in 1952. Christine had been working on a cruise ship, after a series of menial jobs. Her killer was an obsessed fellow steward, and one story is that he had defended her on board after she was teased for wearing her war medals, which the cruise line required staff to do.
The thing about Christine was that for her, these medals included the George Cross, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre. She was born in Poland, as Maria Krystyna Skarbek, and had earned them as the longest-serving, and one of the bravest and most successful, female secret operatives in the war. Working for MI6, her early exploits included many sorties into occupied Poland to smuggle out arms, explosives and information. Later, she was trained by the Special Operations Executive and dropped behind enemy lines in France, taking the name of Christine Granville. She worked for, and managed to rescue, the man responsible for the resistance in the east of the country. Her life story puts James Bond to shame.
When the war was over, she found herself stateless when the Red Army invaded Poland, and was at first denied a passport by the British. Eventually, she was naturalised as a British citizen and legally took the Granville name. But she was penniless, and too proud to ask for help – and so she took whatever jobs she could to survive, including, fatally, the cruise ship role.
Long after she died in poverty and obscurity, her trunk of personal possessions was found, with her SOE dagger among them. Since then, Polish groups have fought to restore her reputation. I’ve proudly stood next to a bronze bust of her at the Polish Hearth Club and there is a blue plaque commemorating her on the building where she died. In a strange twist of fate, there is now a Christine Granville suite at the new Raffles Hotel in London. The luxury five-star hotel is based in the Old War Office on Whitehall, where Churchill’s war plans were enacted. I wonder what the real Christine, who was known as ‘Churchill’s favourite spy’, would make of that.
The third case is sadly and strangely connected to the second. Teresa Lubienska was a Polish countess who knew Granville well, and had attended her funeral. She, too, had worked heroically in Polish resistance in the war. She was captured by the Nazis and sent first to Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck concentration camp. She survived but, like Christine’s, her London existence was hard. For the next dozen years, she lived in a modest apartment and continued to advocate for survivors of the camps, trying to get them compensation.
On May 24 1957, Teresa was found alone, dying of knife wounds, on the platform of Gloucester Road Station, less than half a mile from where Granville had been stabbed. Was she killed by a wartime collaborator, fearful of exposure? Or by a gang of hooligans on the platform? Her last word was ‘Banditi!’ Either way, the police conducted 18,000 interviews, and yet her murder remains one of the unsolved cases of the 1950s.
Here were two women whose wartime bravery should have marked them out as heroes, but who struggled in a society that simply saw them as ‘foreign’, and had moved on. By sheer coincidence, their work with various resistance groups resonated strongly with the death of my ‘tart in the tiara’, whose backstory was inspired by another resistance fighter caught by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck: Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine. Justine Picardie’s book on Catherine Dior is well worth a read. Almost unrecognisable when she returned to Paris, ‘Ginette’ survived as her brother’s much-loved muse. He died in 1957, but she lived on until 2008 and grew roses for his perfumes. Her story is a strange and unique mixture of torture and couture.
In my books, it’s Queen Elizabeth II who secretly solves the crimes. When I first set out to create the Queen as a detective, it was her queen-ness that gave her a special insight into each mystery. By nature of her role, she had knowledge and access that nobody could match. But in practice, it is usually her woman-ness that gives her the insight she needs. She’s looking where the men in her life aren’t looking; she can see what they can’t see.
I try and imagine the Queen as we knew her – dedicated, well-travelled, busy, privileged – but also as a fictional Golden Age detective, a moral figure stepping in where the police are stumped. In A Death in Diamonds, she pays attention, and unlike in the real case of Lubienska, justice can be done.
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