Never Trust Anyone Who’s Lived in Shanghai! – Elizabeth Wilson’s War Damage

When it is announced in a novel of intrigue, bad goings on and violent murder that a character once lived in ‘…Shanghai, before the war’, you know that character is going to turn out to be interesting one way or another – invariably mad, bad and dangerous to know as well as sexually loose and probably with a mild perversion or two and a whole closet of secrets. When a bunch of characters have Shanghai pasts, well…and so Elizabeth Wilson’s War Damage, a tale of murder and intrigue in barely post-war London is a great read with some regrettable and shady Shanghai pasts thrown in. As ever blurb below and also a plug for Wilson’s excellent previous novel The Twilight Hour, which I also enjoyed immensely.

London in the aftermath of WW2 is a beaten down, hungry place, so it’s no wonder that Regine Milner’s Sunday house parties in her Hampstead home are so popular. Everyone comes to Reggie’s on a Sunday: ballet dancers and cabinet ministers, left-over Mosleyites alongside flamboyant homosexuals like Freddie Buckingham. And when Freddie turns up dead on the Heath one Sunday night there is no shortage of suspects. War Damage is both a high-class thriller and a wonderful evocation of Britain staggering back to its feet after the privations of the War. And in Regine Milner it possesses a truly memorable heroine. She’s full of secrets — just what did happen in Shanghai before the war? — and surprises — Reggie’s living proof that sexual experimentation was alive and well long before the sixties.

London, 1947: it’s freezing winter in the shabby, bomb-damaged city. Young socialite Dinah Wentworth, a bright, innocent newcomer to the Fitzrovia scene, becomes embroiled in a dark scandal when she discovers the corpse of surrealist artist Titus Mavor. Not wanting to explain her reasons for being at Mavor’s flat that evening, she decides against reporting her grim discovery to the police. But her silence has terrible consequences. Her husband?s friend, Colin Harris, is linked to the crime and arrested on suspicion of murder. Dinah realises someone is trying to frame him and knows she must uncover the real villain before Harris is hanged. Set against the background of the Cold War, post-war shortages, and the struggling British film industry, Elizabeth Wilson’s elegant noir vividly evokes the fashions and politics of a bohemian community flourishing in defiance of austerity. The Twilight Hour is a riveting thriller with a corkscrew twist.