Book Review: Queens of London by Heather Webb

Based on real-life historical figures in post-World War I London, Heather Webb’s latest novel brings to vivid life the complicated web that tied together criminal and police circles in that era and the unsuspecting people caught in the middle.

Alice Diamond is better known by her street moniker, Diamond Annie. Tall and tough, she’s taken over leadership of the notorious women’s gang, Forty Elephants, and brought them to new heights, independent of the male Elephant and Castle Mob from which they derived both their origin and name. Alice rules over her girls with an iron fist but makes sure that they all share fairly in the spoils of their heists, granting them a lifestyle far nicer than their hardscrabble upbringings in the London slums.

But she can’t help everyone, not even her best friend and associate Ruth, who refuses to leave an abusive lover. Even after the worst beatings, Ruth insists on making excuses for him, claiming that he loves her womanly softness. Alice, understandably, hates this:

She went nearly blind with rage at Ruth’s obtuseness. It wasn’t Ruth’s femininity the tyrant loved. It was her weakness. Her inability to stand up for herself. He was the variety of man that hated women, feared them and wanted to control them because it gave him someone to hate more than himself. But Alice knew she couldn’t convince Ruth of this. The only thing she could do was encourage her to join the Forties at their future home. Let it be her place of refuge. There, they would have safety and strength in numbers. They could prevent Mike from ever touching Ruth again.

Alice clearly has ambitions to do more than just rake in the cash for a fleeting good time, but her plans to take care of her girls are not without their obstacles. Prominent amongst these is Inspector Lilian Wyles, one of the first policewomen in English history. Intelligent, courageous, and desperate to prove herself to her bosses, she’s set her sights on nabbing Diamond Annie.

The cat-and-mouse game between the two women is complicated by the appearance of two others: young Hira Wickham and pretty Dorothy McBride. Anglo-Indian Hira lives in the care of her greedy Uncle Clive. When her parents die while abroad, he threatens to send her to a boarding school that is little better than a workhouse. In a panic, Hira runs away from their West End mansion. With nowhere to run to, she soon finds herself under Alice and the Forty Elephants’ wing.

Dorothy is a shopgirl whose dreams of a future in fashion are too often undercut by those who refuse to believe that she could have a brain inside her head of red curls. Her kind heart and weakness for romance further put her in untenable positions. When her path collides with the three others, will she be able to make the right choices for not only herself but the people she cares about most?

Queens Of London does an amazing job of bringing the Roaring Twenties in London to life, highlighting not only the gin-soaked glamor and the sisterly solidarity of so many disparate women, but also examining, at least cursorily, deeper questions of social justice. Lilian, especially, has to battle with her conscience as she finds herself suddenly sympathizing at least with Alice’s aims, if not her methods:

Lilian shook her head. What was right was right. What was just…Well, she had always instinctively lived by the principles of fairness and justice. They gave order to the chaos of human nature, brought light when all appeared dark or hopeless. But for the first time, she questioned what justice really meant. She was also beginning to see a sort of twisted symbiotic relationship between criminal and police. The line that divided them was far thinner than she’d ever realized. This truth was uncomfortable, irritating like a kernel of corn stuck in her teeth.

Feminist and fierce, this novel doesn’t go for easy answers as each woman does the best that she’s able to in order to reshape her world for the better, in the only ways she knows how. I especially appreciated the inclusion of Hira, who has to deal with racism on top of the challenges the older women face. Webb indulges in no whitewashing in this historical fiction, fully describing London’s thriving East End, populated with migrants from the Indian subcontinent. Such a wide-lensed look at the past only adds verisimilitude to her tale of cops and robbers attempting to best one another in the seemingly endless human circle of crime and punishment.