Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

The years following the end of World War II are sometimes thought of as ‘boom’ years, where economies were growing, families were settling down, and lots of children were being born. But the reality is, the immediate postwar period wasn’t a particularly easy time. There were scarcities, lingering hatreds, and the physical and psychological damage suffered by those who’d fought in the war. Millions of lives had been lost, too, both in the war and in the Holocaust. It was an unsettled time, as well. If there wasn’t going to be war, what was coming next? With all of that uncertainly and more, postwar times can make for a very effective background for a crime novel.

For instance, Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood begins right after the war. Lynn Marchmont has been demobbed from the Wrens and has returned to her home village of Warmsley Vale. On the one hand, she’s very glad to be home, and she is glad to be reunited with her mother. On the other, she’s distressed by the economic difficulties of the time. It’s a chore (and you have to be lucky, too) to even get things like fresh cake for tea. Certain things are still being rationed, and farmers aren’t getting enough from their crops to stay in business. Then, to her family’s shock, Gordon Cloade, patriarch and benefactor of the family, is killed in a bomb blast. He’d recently married, so now it seems that his widow will inherit his fortune. This will leave the other members of the family with nothing. Then, a man calling himself Enoch Arden comes to town. He hints that Cloade’s widow might have been married to someone else at the time of her wedding to Cloade. If so, then she can’t inherit. When the stranger is found dead, the whole question of what will happen to the money becomes even more complicated. Hercule Poirot is asked to investigate the death. The story is about the murder, and that is solved, but it’s also very much about life in the UK at the end of the war.

Gordon Ferris’ The Hanging Shed also explores postwar life, this time in Glasgow. Douglas Brodie has just returned to London from wartime service. He wants to settle there and try to make a career as a journalist. Then he gets a call from an old friend, Hugh ‘Shug’ Donovan. It seems that Donovan has been arrested for the abduction and murder of a young boy, Rory Hutchinson. Donovan says that he’s innocent, but Brodie can’t be sure of that. And in any case, he has no real interest in going back to Glasgow. But Donovan says he’s likely to be executed unless his name can be cleared. Brodie finally agrees, and works with Donovan’s solicitor, Samantha ‘Sam’ Campbell, to find out the truth. As the novel goes on, we see how the war left many soldiers physically and mentally devastated. There’s not much money, and plenty of people are just scraping by and trying to get on with life. It’s not a particularly hopeful, happy context, but it shows how people tried to pull themselves together after the war.

In Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, we meet Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. During World War II, he worked at an aircraft manufacturing plant. But now that the war’s over, the plant has cut back, and Rawlins has lost his job. There’s not much available in post-war Los Angeles for a Black man, so Rawlins is hard-pressed to pay his mortgage, buy food, and so on. That’s why he’s willing to listen when a man named DeWitt Albright offers him a job. He wants Rawlins to find a woman named Daphne Monet. Rawlins agrees to the job and gets caught up in a case of deception and murder. And he begins a new career as a sort of private investigator.

David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars takes place in 1954. The body of respected fisher Carl Heine, Jr. has been pulled from the sea, and it looks as though he could have been murdered. Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the crime, arrested, and tried. As the trial goes on, we see that the Heine and Miyamoto families have a history. It seems that before WW II, Carl Heine, Sr. had agreed to sell some land to the Miyamoto family. But the war and the internment of Japanese-Americans changed everything. The land was sold to someone else, so prosecutors believe that that feud is the reason for the murder. There’s a lot of deep-seated prejudice against the Japanese and Japanese-American communities, so it’s very difficult to get past that to find out what really happened. The town’s local newspaper editor, Ishmael Chambers, has his own prejudices and his own history, but he also wonders whether Miyamoto is innocent. As the story goes on, we see how those wartime sentiments and the internment camps impacted communities even years after the war was over.

Then there’s Geoffrey McGeachin’s The Digger’s Rest Hotel, which takes place in 1947. Police detective Charlie Berlin has returned from wartime service to his native Melbourne. He’s soon seconded to the town of Wodonga, to help the local police stop a motorcycle gang. When fifteen-year-old Amy Lee is found dead, it’s presumed to be the work of the motorcycle gang, and Berlin wants to find out if that’s true. As he untangles the threads of these two cases, we learn about post-war life in that part of Victoria. Despite their service in the war, life hasn’t gotten much better for Aborigines; there is still prejudice against them. And although the infrastructure hasn’t been devastated as it was in much of Europe, there are plenty of people who lost loved ones in the war. Many of those who’ve returned, like Charlie, have scars both mental and physical.

And that’s the thing about war. Things don’t magically get better after the guns stop. After WW II there was privation and scarcity. Work wasn’t always easy to come by, the hatred that had fueled the war didn’t suddenly end, and there were many, many returning soldiers who had to try to pick up the pieces of their lives. It was unsettling time, and that shows in the crime fiction from and about those years.

ps.  The photo is a copy of Albert Eisenstaedt’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse when the war was declared over. There’s been controversy over who, exactly, those two people were, but many people think their names were George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor’s Who I Was.