UBC: Lefebure, Murder on the Home Front

Murder on the Home Front: A True Story of Morgues, Murderers, and Mysteries During the London Blitz by Molly Lefebure

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Molly Lefebure was a remarkable woman. I just wish she'd let it show.

I'm giving Murder on the Home Front four stars for its value as a primary source about living in London during World War II. Lefebure captures vividly what it felt like to go through the Blitz, and about the sheer hell of carrying on with daily life in a city that was being destroyed around your ears. She's an excellent, engaging writer with occasional startlingly poetic turns of phrase.

But her persona. Oh dear god I wanted to drown her in a bucket. She is chipper and cozy, and she presents herself as a person with barely two thoughts to scrape together in her head, which a glance at her biography shows is manifestly untrue. And while she's being chipper and cozy in the foreground, her job, as secretary to Keith Simpson, would be fascinating if she'd let us see it.

She is not a true crime writer. She doesn't have the knack (and there is definitely a knack to it), and her focus is always just slightly off-center--or, conversely, my focus is slightly off-center. Despite the fabulous opening line: The murdered baby had been found in a small suitcase.: this is much more about living in London during World War II and happening to have an unusual job, replete with "characters" to provide anecdotes, than it is about, say, the practice of forensic pathology between 1941 and 1946. It is very decidedly a memoir.

So, fascinating book, just not quite in the way I wanted it to be.



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