Upon her first taste of gin, it had come to Lil with the force of revelation that only her looks stood between this tantalising taste of glamour and the lifetime of drudgery to which she had been assigned. She awoke in a hotel room in Paddington with a five-pound note on the pillow beside her ... [p. 81]
London, 1942: blackouts, the Blitz, servicemen from abroad, black marketeers, prostitutes, spiritualists ... Without the Moon (a line, like the chapter headings, from a popular song of the time) is a fictionalised account of the 'Blackout Ripper' murders -- four women killed in six days by a Canadian airman -- and another woman murdered on Waterloo Bridge days later. Unsworth gives us DCI Greenaway, former star of the Flying Squad (which focussed on organised crime), now with the Murder Squad: an old-school policeman with plenty of friends and contacts in the criminal underworld.
I enjoyed Unsworth's That Old Black Magic more than Without the Moon, though the two books share a setting and some characters, and a distinctly noirish ambience. I kept expecting supernatural elements, but though there (arguably) are some, they're very obliquely described. And I could have done without the grisly details of the murders. As in that previous book, Unsworth writes a lot of flashbacks: typically, Greenaway is standing somewhere, staring broodily out into the blackout night, and then reflecting on recent events.
I didn't dislike the novel, but I found it rather disappointing, without the energy and weirdness of That Old Black Magic (or, come to think of it, Weirdo). Some intriguing characters, and a powerful evocation of wartime London; plenty of cosmopolitan London slang, with its Yiddish / Polari / Cockney elements; the rough justice of the underworld.
Unsworth's ebooks seem to have been withdrawn: I'd had this wishlisted for ages before I went hunting and found it on Hive.co.uk.
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