Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog and the Strangling of a City

Lethal air pollution brushes up against a gruesome strangler in this evocative but scattered historical study. Journalist Dawson recreates the London smog of December 1952, when a windless high-pressure system prevented fumes from the city’s coal-burning heaters, stoves, and smokestacks from dispersing; the resulting yellow-brown, soot-flecked miasma reduced visibility to one yard and seeped into houses, killing thousands of people. Dawson’s account of environmental catastrophe is vividly atmospheric as she describes Londoners staggering blindly in the fog and watching loved ones die. Jammed in is the story of John Reginald Christie, a sad-sack serial killer who murdered several women years before the smog and several more in the months afterward, but who did nothing noteworthy during the smog itself. Other than serving as a metaphorical embodiment of the smog (he asphyxiated victims with coal gas), Christie has no clear purpose in the narrative, but his story does supply an intriguing true-crime subplot in the smog’s aftermath while parliamentary debate about the smog drags on. The smushed-together narratives add up to a grim, Dickensian portrait of postwar London: broke, grimy, dejected, deranged around the edges, and gasping for breath. (Oct.)