Yrsa Sigurdardottir: Someone To Watch Over Me

A fatal hit-and run seems to lead to a haunting of the house where the dead girl used to babysit.

A late night talk show host is tormented by mysterious phone calls and emails from someone who seems to know him all too well.

A paralysed girl who can only communicate through eye movements has a terrible secret.

And Thora Gudmundsdottir receives a strange request from a serial child molester being held at Iceland's major facility for the criminally insane. He want to hire her to investigate a closed case to see if there are grounds for the verdict to be set aside - but it's not his own case. Jósteinn Karlsson wants her to prove the innocence of a severely mentally handicapped young man who is one of his fellow inmates, who was charged with arson and the murder of five people - four of them residents of a community living project for people with disabilities and the fifth an employee there - who died in the fire.

Thora's investigation will ultimately cross the paths of all these people, and uncover the truth behind all these mysteries - or at least, all the truth that can be found.

In Someone To Watch Over Me, Yrsa Sigurdardottir has shaped another fascinating, atmospheric mystery, with just a touch of the strange and inexplicable - but she also gives us a journey into the world of the physically and developmentally disabled, and those who care for them, their fears and frustrations and vulnerabilities. Looming over everything is the shadow cast by the global recession, affecting almost everyone in one way or another. Sigurdardottir's gift is to set her mysteries in a complex and detailed world where there is always much more to be seen than just the crime and the investigation.

Gretchen Garzina: Black London: Life Before Emancipation

In Black London: Life before Emancipation, Gretchen Garzina looks at the history of black people in England, a history that - despite the common belief of many - stretches back for centuries. In her Introduction, Grezina sets out her intention to document the black presence in England which, as stated in a quotation from scholar Peter Freyer, 'goes back some 2,000 years and has been continuous since the beginning of the sixteenth century or earlier.’ Grezina goes on to identify the scope of the sources she draws on:

While nearly five centuries have passed since the beginning of that continuous presence, a vivid trail of diaries, memoirs, public records and pictures remains. The satirical prints sold by seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century booksellers still appear in shop windows on the King’s Road and in Bloomsbury; the dozens of novels containing black characters from the same period are still in many libraries. My task in this book is to reconstruct London, and indeed the entire country, by altering our vision.

Beginning with the presence of black entertainers and servants in the courts of Queen Elizabeth, and the slave trade which she supported - although she also expressed concern at the number of black people entering England, slave or free, who threatened the livelihood of white Britons - there have been black people living and working in Britain. What Gerzina achieves here is to paint a detailed picture of their lives, of the range of black experiences, from honoured courtiers to enslaved workers.

... once the lens through which we view the eighteenth century is refocused, the London of Johnson, Reynolds, Hogarth and Pope—that elegant, feisty, intellectual and earthy place of neo-classicism and city chaos—becomes occupied by a parallel world of Africans and their descendants working and living alongside the English. They answer their doors, run their errands, carry their purchases, wear their livery, appear in their lawcourts, play their music, drink in their taverns, write in their newspapers, appear in their novels, poems and plays, sit for their portraits, appear in their caricatures and marry their servants. They also have private lives and baptize their own children, attend schools, bury their dead. They are everywhere in the pictures we have all seen and the pages we have turned. They were as familiar a sight to Shakespeare as they were to Garrick, and almost as familiar to both as they are to Londoners today.

Grezina also explores the legal cases touching on the issue of the legitimacy of slavery in Britain, illustrating the slow evolution in law of abolitionist ideas. She spends considerable time on the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart case which, despite its narrow applicability - resolving only the question of whether one man, James Somerset, was to be considered slave or free under British law - became a significant precedent and influenced the politics of slavery far beyond the effect specified by the judge, William Murray, Lord Mansfield (who was the great-uncle and guardian of Dido Elizabeth Belle [2])

All over Britain and America, slaves, abolitionists, lawyers and judges cited the Somerset case as ending slavery in Britain, a precedent which many saw as applying to America as well: slaves who crossed into free states with their masters, even temporarily, tested the legality of slavery. Despite Mansfield’s many pains to reassert the deliberate narrowness of his decision, he seemed powerless to stem the tide of misinterpretation, demonstrating ‘a legal world where things are not what they seem, a world of deceptive appearances and unforeseen consequences’.... Despite the decision, slaves were still sold and sent out of the country for years afterward, often quite openly.

As unrest grew in the American colonies, British colonial governors began to offer escaped slaves and freedom in return for enrolling in the British armies. These freedmen fought for the British side and after the Revolution, many - though not all - were evacuated, along with other British Loyalists. Ironically, many of these free blacks sailed alongside white Loyalists departing for other British colonies with their slaves. In all, approximately 14,000 free blacks were transported to Nova Scotia, Jamaica, St Lucia, Nassau and England. Unfortunately, the British Empire was not prepared for such an influx of free black displaced British citizens.

Up until 1783 Britain’s black population consisted mainly of servants and former servants, musicians and seamen. Suddenly, with the end of the war with America, England felt itself ‘overwhelmed’ by an influx of black soldiers who had served the loyalist cause and who crossed the Atlantic for their promised freedom and compensation. Refugees from slavery shuttled between the West Indies, America, Canada, Europe and Africa looking for freedom, homes and work in a western world still financially dependent upon slavery and the slave trade. There was, it seemed, no safe harbour, no one to trust, no way to escape the effects of the African diaspora and 250 years of the triangular trade.

British response to the increase of the black population was, ultimately, to try to get rid of it. Grezina details the disastrous history of the scene to resettle as many blacks as possible from Britain to Sierra Leone, noting that "From beginning to end, even with the most altruistic and charitable of motives, England’s involvement with the Sierra Leone colony had involved intrigue, greed and poor planning." After suffering years of mismanagement, chaos, and neglect, the situation in the colony finally began to improve with the arrival of a second group of black settlers from Nova Scotia.

Ironically, once the government plan to send blacks from Britain to Sierra Leone was embarked upon, the momentum of the abolitionist movement in Britain began to build up speed. In the last section of her book, Grezina examines the key events marking the movement's progress, ending in the adoption on March 25, 1807, of a bill stating that as of 1 January 1808 the slave trade was to be ‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful’.

Grezina's work is well- and widely-researched, highly readable, and full of detail that brings to life both the experience of black people in the heart of England and the struggle for freedom.


[1] Peter Fryer, Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_Elizabeth_Belle