A SONG FROM DEAD LIPS

The sixties were swinging only for the young, for others it was a confusing time as society woke up to a dawning sexual revolution. Meanwhile three thousand miles away communities were being massacred; former African colonies were in chaos and the Biafran War raged in Nigeria. In London these disparate worlds converged and the body of a girl was found, strangled and dumped in St John’s Wood.

 Enter D.S. Cathal Breen, born and raised in London by his Irish father, inheriting high principles and emotional volatility. Untutored and awkward with women, repressed around cops, he is a loner in a canteen culture of misogyny and prurience, racism and corruption. Already under a cloud having deserted a colleague threatened by an armed thief, Breen is assigned the new but routine case (“just another naked bird”), and – further slight – a female probationer. However, Helen Tozer is an earthy farm girl and flexible. She has taken to the urban scene of Beatlemania, Carnaby Street and groupies like a duck to water and complements her imaginative but bemused boss to mould a maverick team.

This is not a story featuring the Beatles or Biafra or even the evils spawned by colonialism but the characters who live on the fringes: orbiting stars. Groupies predominate, and their parents: confused, angry, submissive, domineering. It’s about gradations of class before the sudden acquisition of wealth had yet to blur the edges; about race when even a black hospital consultant could be referred to obscenely (and not long since landladies refused to accept dogs and Irish). All is impeccably researched. Shaw has imbued his London and its people: natives, incomers, transients, with the crude and frenetic aura of a decade, a time when pop culture was only the face of revolt, when, behind the façade, the old guard attempted to shore up the barricades, and people died violently. Breen and Tozer picked up some of the pieces: society’s bin men.