Cover image Little Deaths by Emma Flint. Image via Picador.
Emma Flint is known for her encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases and is said to be fascinated by unorthodox women. So it is not surprising that although Little Deaths is an acknowledged work of fiction, this crime novel by Flint draws heavily on the mysterious disappearance of the Crimmins children in 1965 and the subsequent conviction of their unconventional mother for murder.
Ruth Malone, the mother in Little Deaths, looks after her two young children as best she can. They are normal happy youngsters with a caring mother. Ruth is estranged from her husband and supplements her earnings as a waitress through a variety of relationships with men. Because Ruth likes bars and drinking and dancing and men and is by no means the tidiest of housekeepers the police cannot believe she also cared deeply and properly for her children. Thus she is assumed to be guilty of their murder by a corrupt and biased police officer who searches only for evidence to condemn her when her two young children disappear.
All this makes for an intriguing plot made more spine-chilling by the fact that so much of it is based on fact. It is therefore a pity that the main characters in the book do frequently behave in less than convincing ways. For a person described as clever, for instance, Ruth Malone does some very stupid things. Perhaps so did Alice Crimmins, on whose character Ruth Malone is based, but that does not excuse the fact that Ruth fails to come across as fully credible.
Similarly, the main detective on the case, Sergeant Devlin, who is convinced from the outset of Ruth Malone’s guilt, deliberately discards any information that does not confirm his biased view. This is done so blatantly that the reader can only wonder if this was typical of his approach and, if so, how Devlin ever made it to detective sergeant.
One person who believes in Ruth Malone’s innocence, based not on evidence but on feeling, is novice newspaper reporter Peter Wonicke. He goes out of his way to prove that Ruth is not guilty of the crime, at great personal cost to himself. Like many of the other characters in this novel his integrity is questionable even if he is on the side of the angels.
The strengths of this novel include the descriptions of 1970s New York of bars and cafes and clubs, of local gossip and the minutiae of life at the time. The opening chapter, with its well-rendered despair of prison life, represents a standard of writing sadly not maintained throughout the book. At times, the story is page-turning, but at others, it is repetitive and lacks momentum.
The acknowledgements at the close of Little Deaths finish with the following words: ‘And finally, to all the dreadful managers and employers I’ve had; thank you for making my day job so awful that I rushed to escape into Ruth’s world every night and every weekend. You made me determined.’ This is a gem among acknowledgments if ever there was one and perhaps the reason why so many of the characters in this book are unlikeable. Mind you, Emma Flint also gives fulsome acknowledgement to the many people who helped improve Little Deaths during its formative period. Perhaps they should have suggested one more revision.
Rating: 2 1/2 stars out of 5
Little Deaths A Novel by Emma Flint
Picador
Publication date: 12.01.2017
ISBN: 9781509826575
Number of pages: 320
