A Commonplace Killing by Siân Busby (Short Books, £12.99)
Sian Busby’s posthumously published novel is set in north London just after the Second World War. A gang of children playing on a bomb site in the “neglected triangle” between Camden, Holloway and the Caledonian Road one hot midsummer morning discover the dead body of a woman who has been strangled. They are not surprised or especially shocked; such events are now commonplace in these grim, violent post-war times. Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper, decent, pipe-smoking and single, is assigned the case with the help of an attractive young A4 Branch girl, Policewoman Tring. As he starts to collect the evidence, we learn the story of Lillian Frobisher, a woman in her early forties who is clearly the murder victim, set against a vividly realised portrait of postwar London.
Lillian is disillusioned with “the drabness” of her life. Her husband is recently back from the war, “diminished, battered and spent”; her teenage son no longer needs her; her senile mother, who does, is bedridden and covered in bedsores. Food is rationed and she must queue for stale bread. She longs to escape to a “job in a hat shop and nice handsome men … looking for a little harmless diversion” and tells herself she may be in her forties but she still has sex appeal.
In a moving introduction to the novel, Busby’s husband Robert Peston explains how he transcribed the final 20 pages from Busby’s handwritten manuscript after she died from cancer in September 2012. “I am clear that Siân would not have wished you to make any allowances for her debilitated state during the act of creation,” he writes. And while that’s right and proper, it is impossible to read the book without acknowledging Busby’s reflections on her own imminent death as anything other than dark shadows. “To have death steal up on you knowingly, expectantly. He imagined that all you can do in such circumstance as that would be to deny that it is going to happen; believe that there will be a reprieve — even up to the last second.”
