Lead Review (A Granite Silence)
- Book: A Granite Silence
- Location: Aberdeen
- Author: Nina Allan
First off, the cover is spot on for the story brought to life within the pages of this book. So striking.
From the Press & Journal
The book opens with the author travelling in post covid times up to Scotland. As the train trundles north, she shares her thoughts and inspiration for choosing the subject at the heart of the story. It is the true story of how eight year old Helen Priestly was murdered, in 1934, in Urquhart Street in the city of Aberdeen. She had gone out to buy bread during her lunch break, sent on the errand by her mother. She never returned and all too soon her body was found in a canvas flour sack, printed with the insignia “Boss”, a brand of flour that had come from Kansas via Canada. It was a very uncommon brand, yet the clues were few and far between. That bag with body had been deposited in the communal hallway of the tenement flats where she lived. Before long a pair of suspects where arrested and only one of them went to trial over in Edinburgh, where the heat of feeling around the child’s death was assumed to be less toxic.
The author has crafted a clever Netflix-style documentary – only in words – as she examines the case through a variety of different eyes. She sets the whole case within its historical context, looking at what was happening locally and internationally in the run-up to eventual war, and the lingering effect Helen’s death has had on a wider community.
She sets out her own research, she looks at the the forensic conclusions, the journalists assigned to the case (notably a female from London, for one, who had to fight to follow developments up in the North of the country, deemed of insignificant interest to Southern readers). She fuses fact and fiction to make a cohesive story, bringing this part of the city to life and positioning her characters in and around the buildings, moving them about so that the era comes to vivid life. She looks at events through records taken at the time, through witness statements and logs, she then blends what went on through a modern lens, moving around the case with an acutely observational eye. There is a real sense of her ‘camerawork’ as she slides her focus this way and that.
And perhaps at base, a deeply rooted spat between families, living in close proximity lay behind the murder…..
An interesting and well constructed way to revisit an old case.
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