The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Disaster Series
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-12-11T06:00:00+00:00

FEBRUARY 11, 1942

AND SO, JOINING THE GLOOM-DRIVEN hazards of the blackout, among the other strains and inconveniences of wartime, came this new and yet all too familiar terror.

The press, the tabloids in particular, seemed to take bloodthirsty relish in having so traditional and homegrown a menace to share with their readers; it was as if the yellow journalists were relieved to be able to interrupt the continuing chronicle of international woe—Singapore falling, Rommel’s Afrika Corps advancing again in the Western Desert—with good old-fashioned British blood lust.

Any respectable women—forced to walk alone down pitch-dark snowy streets, making their way to the safety of air-raid shelters—moved quickly, looking about them in bird-like anxiety, terrified that a lurking murderer might spring from the silence of a doorway or an alley’s mouth, to claim another victim. And was a shelter truly safe, when Monday’s victim had been discovered in one?

And what of the not-so-respectable women of London?

The first Jack the Ripper had terrorized the East End, notorious in its day for an abundance of ladies of the evening. The Blackout Ripper—as the tabloids had dubbed the unknown killer, who had instantly become a household name—sought his soiled-dove prey on the West End, which had become (in these war years particularly, and in the words of Superintendent Fabian of the Yard) “the Square Mile of Vice.”

Even before the blackout, the limited visibility of which made conditions virtually identical to Jack’s fog-shrouded atrocities, these narrow streets and shadowy pavements—Soho, particularly—echoed with the eerie footsteps of London’s long, proud, wicked criminal history. Here you could enjoy anything and everything, for a price—drugs, games of chance, blue movies (in “secret” cinemas); you could buy a diamond ring for two hundred and fifty pounds (only it would prove to be diamothyst, worth one-thirtieth of the price). You could be dominated by a woman with a whip, or defile a “virgin” (Catholic school girl costumes were a must, in the wardrobes of the higher-paid call girls).

By day and night, Piccadilly Circus was bustling, swarming with uniforms from many nations—Poles, Canadians, Free French, and of course the Americans, so many Americans. Sinful business was booming….

So the women of the street, who were not seeking the relative safety of a shelter, put themselves at even greater risk than usual. Many stayed in, however, alone in their dingy flats—or confining their clientele to known and trusted “regulars”—too frightened to venture into their usual haunts. Unbeknownst to them, the ladies of the evening were joined by policewomen in plainclothes and too much makeup, under the watch of Yard men also in the disguise of ordinary clothing.

This had been Detective Chief Inspector Ted Greeno’s doing, only one of a number of strategies he’d pursued, following the three murders. He was, after all, in charge of the biggest case of the war, the kind of murder case that could make a career.

Or break it.

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