Under Cover of Darkness

Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for violent crime.

In this book, Under Cover of Darkness (Yale, 2024), I uncover the hidden stories of murder and violence that were rife in wartime London. I move through the wartime city, examining the crimes in their various locations, from domestic violence in the home to robberies in the blacked-out streets and fights in pubs and clubs. I focus on those often forgotten in war histories: women, children, and the elderly, and explore the lives of the victims, as well as their deaths. These stories transform our understanding of the ways in which war made people vulnerable—not just to the enemy, but to each other.

Life Sentence

This book, Life Sentence (Nimbus, 2023) is a fusion of personal memoir and criminal justice history. On December 15, 1974, when I was a baby, the city of Moncton, New Brunswick, was consumed with the search for two missing police officers –Corporal Aurèle Bourgeois and Constable Michael O'Leary. They had been abducted by petty criminals Richard Ambrose and James Hutchison after a kidnapping that had scored them $15,000. The search would lead to a clearing in the woods where the officers were found — murdered, and buried in shallow graves.

My father, Ed Bell, stepped up to defend the killers, although he was a general practice lawyer with no experience in murder trials. His unpopular stance–"every person accused of a crime deserves a defence" — eventually led to the ruin of his career and his marriage. He never spoke of his involvement in this case, and it wasn't until forty-two years later, when he lay dying, that I stumbled upon a Polaroid photograph of one of the killers among his things. That discovery led me on a search for answers that revealed harsh truths about the criminal justice system and the toll of capital cases on defense lawyers.

Murder Capital

Murder Capital (Manchester University Press, 2014) examines the investigation of suspicious deaths to illuminate the changes in violent crime over a period of great social upheaval and physical destruction before, during and after the Second World War.

Suspicious deaths – murders in the family and by strangers, infanticides and deaths from illegal abortions – reveal moments of personal and communal crisis in the social fabric of the city. Police investigation files, newspaper reports and crime scene photographs reveal not only how people died, but how they lived, and the family tensions, unwanted pregnancies, sexual violence and chance encounters in emotionally-heightened circumstances that led to their untimely ends.

By setting the institutional ordering of the city against the hidden intimate spaces where crimes occurred and were discovered, the book presents a new popular history of the city, in which urban space circumscribed the investigation, classification and public perceptions of crime.

London Was Ours

In my first book London Was Ours (IB Tauris, 2007, pb 2011) I tell the epic story of a London under siege through the voices of those that lived it. For the nine months of the Blitz – from September 1940 to May 1941 – London was subjected to a brutal and indiscriminate bombing campaign, aimed for the first time in history at shattering the resolve of a nation’s people. The Nazi raids on night-time London provide some of the defining narratives of the Second World War; the ‘Blitz spirit’, air raid shelters in Underground stations and all the majesty and power of one of the world’s most powerful cities in ruins.

The book is based on over two hundred and fifty diaries, memoirs and letters of Londoners from all walks of life, who scribbled in notebooks from inside air-raid shelters and bombed-out houses to record their experiences of the Blitz. By weaving these together and drawing out themes of loss, courage and love, what emerges is a commentary on our collective memory of one of the great conflicts of modern times. By letting the warmth, despair and hope of these personal recollections speak, London Was Ours is I hope a monument to the resilience of a people and a meditation on the nature of a nation’s history.