The Midnight Man (The Clapham Trilogy)
London, 1946: Faye Smith is working in the canteen of the South London Hospital for Women and Children, checking ration books before customers can buy food evocative of the time: corned beef, sponge, fruit crumble, custard.
Then she spots a well-dressed young woman who is scrounging leftovers. Though Faye feels Ellie is hiding something, she nevertheless finds her a job and somewhere to stay. That night Ellie witnesses from her window a couple arguing, and the following day the body of a nurse is found behind the locked entrance to Clapham’s wartime tunnels. As the police dismiss the murder as the work of a vagrant, Faye and Ellie seek justice for the dead woman, increasingly endangering their own safety. This might not be the only murder: what happened to the dead woman’s friend, who disappeared so precipitately, having apparently come into money? Why were such large quantities of a drug ordered by the hospital, but not apparently used?
The Midnight Man is an atmospheric thriller with Faye as a resourceful and intelligent heroine; this is the first of a trilogy, so expect more of her. It is also an immersive portrait of South London emerging from long years of war, and of a real-life groundbreaking hospital founded by two women surgeons, for women, and staffed largely by women.
Treatment is not yet free, and Faye’s attempts to get her tubercular sister treated in a streptomycin trial means considerable financial hardship for the girl’s family, but the NHS Act is about to be passed. It’s also a world where it is assumed that women will return to the domestic sphere, after nearly six years of holding the fort when men were conscripted, a destiny that Faye and Ellie in their different ways are determined to resist.
