Simon ReadCritiques

A good job of bringing life to these ultimately sad stories of lives cut short in WWII. I read this during Putins invasion of the Ukraine. Scary similarities to Hitlers strategy of pushing for whatever he could get while the world watched and fretted and delayed getting involved. After all, sane people are not interested in joining war and will do so only when out of alternatives.

Foreshadowing is a hack writing trick, and this author used it at every turn. I found this distracting and annoying. Aside from this unfortunate writing style I enjoyed the book, especially when things heat up and the guns come out.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Most of us know Winston Churchill as the rotund, elderly leader of Great Britain during the tumultuous years of World War Two; but this remarkable man had a long and varied career before that, including being a war correspondent at the end of the Victorian Age who reported from such far-flung battlefields as Cuba, India, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Africa. As historian Simon Read points out in his new book Winston Churchill Reporting, there's never been a full-length book this entire time that's been devoted just to this part of Churchill's life alone; and that's too bad, because as Read's lively, action-packed account shows, the twenty-something Churchill led a life in the late 1800s worthy of an Indiana Jones adventure, getting into the kinds of scrapes and charging through the middle of the kinds of massive battles that would be scarcely believable if it all wasn't so heavily documented by multiple sources.

The son of an aristocrat, the young Churchill was actually in the British army himself in those years, although assigned to one of those largely ceremonial divisions like so many other members of the aristocracy were back then (his regiment was mostly only known for being international polo champions); but seeking fame, glory and adventure, he essentially (with the aid of his blue-blood mother) begged anyone who would listen to send him out where the actual action was, eventually realizing that he could put his writing skills from school to good use and become a free-floating war correspondent, able to be assigned willy-nilly to whatever British Empire hotspots happened to be seeing the most fighting on any given year, and happily joining in the fighting while there himself. This led Churchill through a whole series of adventures, not least of which was getting captured as a prisoner during the Second Boer War in South Africa, then actually escaping his POW camp by trekking across enemy territory for three days and eventually hiding in a mine, and somehow managing to telegraph updates on his own escape to the British newspapers in real time through the help of British sympathizers (a fact that blew me away when reading about it here), turning him instantly into a national celebrity back home and providing the kick that let him finally win his first election to public office, an event that he built and built upon until eventually becoming Prime Minister forty years later.

Read conveys it all through the unusual style of an action novel instead of the usual academic history book, a gutsy move that could've badly backfired on him; but in this case it works perfectly, in that there is just such an overwhelming amount of recorded evidence still around about Churchill's very personal thoughts and opinions about this period of his life, allowing Read to portray him like a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare precisely because Churchill actually was a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare. A lively and incredibly fast-paced book, this will be a revelation to people like me who only knew Churchill as the balding, stogie-chewing curmudgeon of 1940s fame, and it comes strongly recommended to the general public.

Out of 10: 9.5

Interesting follow up to the well known great escape story

This book was... ok, I guess. It was quite boring, lackluster, dull even. The information was interesting, but there were a lot of details that were unnecessary and took away from the important information. The reader doesn't need the history of the man in charge of the fingerprint department. He or she doesn't need to know about the mill and the eels when he was a kid. Also, if you're going to delve into the details of how one Bobby worked his way up, you should do it for all involved with the investigation. Understandably, the book would have been significantly longer and no one would want to read it, so it makes sense that the history of the other investigators is absent from the pages. He shouldn't have included the fingerprint department head's story though, not to mention the background of each victim. Don't get me wrong, it's great that the author tried to shed more light on the victims rather than the killer, but I don't know if this was the right way to do it. We still got a lot about the killer, and yet nothing at all while getting very little about the actual deaths of certain victims and nothing of consequence about any of them. It's quite an enigma, actually; this book tells you quite a bit for it's 283 pages, and yet it tells you nothing.

Interesting follow up to the well known great escape story

Finished this yesterday. a quick read but i have to say i was disappointed. Because of the raving reviews on amazon I had expected a great read but like the other reviewer mentioned, most of it was quite boring to read. Indeed it seems all were taken from transcripts. It is not bad but not great either. I missed the emotional touch in this book probably because most of it was taken from Scotland Yard's files.
I have read other historical true crime books were the author did manage to make it more personable so yes, it can be done.

If there's one thing that DARK CITY reminds the reader of - it's that it doesn't matter what is happening around us, there are always the good, the bad and the downright opportunistic members of the human race.

There's always been stories of the strength and determination of the British people during the Blitz and the Second World War in general - their stoicism, the way that they pulled together and survived the dreadful bombardments throw at them in the course of the war. But I don't remember that much concentration on the lesser elements of society. The murderers that used the elements of the blitz to their own ends - the blackouts, the deprivations, the sheer distraction of the people as a whole. There were also the murderers that simply could not help themselves, that kill regardless of the circumstances or the time.

DARK CITY is an interesting book that combines a look at a series of murders with some observation of the time in which they occurred. Interestingly there is also a family connection for the author, his grandfather was the arresting officer in one of the murders discussed by the book.

Covering a wide range of murder types - serial and opportunistic, from the lesser known to the notorious such as the Rillington Place Murderer, John Christie, DARK CITY gives the reader a different viewpoint of London during the Blitz.

Interestingly, whilst the idea that there were crooks and murderers within a society that was so threatened by external threats is sobering, the overwhelming message that comes from the book is that no matter how constrained by external factors, how limited the scientific options available, there remained an overwhelming desire to investigate, resolve and find justice for the victims.

On the House tells the sad but undeniably funny story of The Murder Trust, a group of incompetent would-be criminals who hatch a plot to take out insurance on a third party and then kill him to collect the rewards. The time is 1933 and the setting is a low rent speakeasy owned by the Trust's 'mastermind' Anthony Marino. Their chosen victim is Michael Malloy, a vagrant alcholohlic who passes out on the floor of the speakeasy on a nightly basis. The gist of the book then deals with the Trust's attempts to secure an insurance policy and their multiple unsuccessful attempts to murder the seemingly invulnerable (and unaware) Michael Malloy.

True Crime is not the section of the bookstore I would normally look to for laughs, but I have to say that I chuckled and laughed out loud during several sections of the book. The members of the Trust have no business being criminals. Even the simplest parts of their plan wind up becoming overly complicated, important details would be entrusted to shady characters and schemes would fall apart at regular intervals.

I have to give credit to Simon Read though. While the book is very funny, he also manages to constantly remind you that Michael Malloy was a very real person. Someone who thought of the members of the Trust as his only real friends in the world. He manages to take a low rent, alchoholic cipher of a person (about whom so little is known that he is never able to be connected to any sort of family) and turn him into a sort of tragic character.

I don't read much true crime, but I thought enough of this book to pick up his next one: In the Dark: The True Story of the Blackout Ripper.

I think On the House would make an excellent Coen Brothers movie. If you like quirky crime stories or stories dealing with simple plans gone awry, I'd recommend this book.½

Quick read. Didn't answer my question of why.