A group I belong to was doing a challenge throughout the month of October to read books by or about people or places in Ireland. Since Rebecca West, the journalist, travel writer, and novelist was part Irish and she was born in Kerry, this was one of the books I read for it. As is probably obvious from the cover art, <i>A Train of Powder</i> is a collection of six articles she wrote while covering various criminal trials. They read more like short stories than like magazine articles because the author really develops the characters, their background, the circumstances of the crimes, and also her own thoughts on the situations.
Three of the articles make up a series called <i> Greenhouse with Cyclamens</i>, where she relates her thoughts during the closing sessions of the Nuremberg Trials and the rebuilding of Germany, including her observations of the personalities of top Nazi leaders like Goering and Hess as they sat in the dock, differences between German and American/British law, growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the other three Allies who shared control of Germany, leading up to the Soviets’ attempt to isolate Berlin from the West and the resulting Berlin Airlift, and the nascent West German government’s insistence on a free market economy despite pressure from the occupying Allies to adopt a more statist model.
<i>Opera in Greenville</i> is about a lynching in Greenville, South Carolina in 1947. A mob of about 30 people, mostly cabdrivers, convinced the prison warden to hand over a young black man named Willie Earle, in jail on suspicion of having killed the disabled white cabdriver who was driving him home. After some days of no results from the local police, the FBI was called in to find the perpetrators. West does a good job of sketching out what life was like in 1940’s Greenville and situating the crime in a society undergoing a transition in its attitudes towards race relations and vigilante justice.
<i>Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume</i> is about a 1949 London murder case. A man who enjoys hunting on weekends goes out in his boat to the marshlands at the mouth of the Thames hoping to bag some duck. Instead, he comes across a bag full of a more grisly type of meat. The remains turn out to be those of Mr. Setty, a shady businessman and member of a well-to-do immigrant family. Mr. Hume is the ex-R.A.F. pilot with a checkered past charged with the murder and disposal of the body.
<i>A Better Mousetrap</i> is the story of an espionage case involving a young British radio telegraph operator employed at the Diplomatic Wireless Service suspected of passing information to a high official in the Soviet embassy.
Three of the articles make up a series called <i> Greenhouse with Cyclamens</i>, where she relates her thoughts during the closing sessions of the Nuremberg Trials and the rebuilding of Germany, including her observations of the personalities of top Nazi leaders like Goering and Hess as they sat in the dock, differences between German and American/British law, growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the other three Allies who shared control of Germany, leading up to the Soviets’ attempt to isolate Berlin from the West and the resulting Berlin Airlift, and the nascent West German government’s insistence on a free market economy despite pressure from the occupying Allies to adopt a more statist model.
<i>Opera in Greenville</i> is about a lynching in Greenville, South Carolina in 1947. A mob of about 30 people, mostly cabdrivers, convinced the prison warden to hand over a young black man named Willie Earle, in jail on suspicion of having killed the disabled white cabdriver who was driving him home. After some days of no results from the local police, the FBI was called in to find the perpetrators. West does a good job of sketching out what life was like in 1940’s Greenville and situating the crime in a society undergoing a transition in its attitudes towards race relations and vigilante justice.
<i>Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume</i> is about a 1949 London murder case. A man who enjoys hunting on weekends goes out in his boat to the marshlands at the mouth of the Thames hoping to bag some duck. Instead, he comes across a bag full of a more grisly type of meat. The remains turn out to be those of Mr. Setty, a shady businessman and member of a well-to-do immigrant family. Mr. Hume is the ex-R.A.F. pilot with a checkered past charged with the murder and disposal of the body.
<i>A Better Mousetrap</i> is the story of an espionage case involving a young British radio telegraph operator employed at the Diplomatic Wireless Service suspected of passing information to a high official in the Soviet embassy.
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