War crimes

THE Blitz usually conjures up images of people pulling together for the war effort. However, a new crime drama is set to show it in a different light.

Murder On The Home Front explores the seedier side of life during this period, revealing how opportunists flourished and criminals hid their darkest activities during London’s blackouts.

“The Blitz was this wonderful cloak for all sorts of terrible behaviour,” says Patrick Kennedy, who plays pathologist Lennox Collins, a character loosely based on former pathologist and pioneer of modern forensics Dr Keith Simpson.

“There were many rapes and murders.

I think partly because people felt that somehow justice was suspended as there was a larger enemy to fight. And there were a lot of frustrated soldiers on leave and away from home.”

The story, and characters that populate it, is inspired by the original memoirs of Molly Lefebure, who Dr Simpson recruited as his secretary.

Kennedy says: “He was the first pathologist to have an assistant, so in the drama it is deemed quite unusual by those above, but Molly is invaluable.

“She has a wonderful no-nonsense attitude.

She is not fazed by the gore and muck and macabre elements.”

Tamzin Merchant, who starred as Catherine Howard in The Tudors, brings Molly Cooper to life. She says: “Her real passion is to be a crime writer, so she makes it her job to report on all the crimes she can in London.

“When she meets Lennox, she becomes his assistant because she does not have a problem with blood, guts and looking at corpses. She is fascinated by it rather than disgusted.”

When young women are found murdered, Simpson strays out of his remit into detective work “as is so often the case with TV pathologists,” says Kennedy.

“But it is out of his enthusiasm to get the right killer.”

A particularly gory signature links the victims – each of them has a Swastika carved into their tongue – “which gives even my character pause when he sees it for the first time,” says Kennedy.

“We don’t know if we are on the hunt for a Nazi killer in London or something more complicated, and we have a wonderful cast of suspects, from a louche soldier to a nightclub-owning mobster.”

The actors revelled in bringing the period to life. “The 1940s was such a sexy period for women. The style and design of all the clothes for my character have been really feminine,” says Merchant.

She did not get to meet the real Molly before she died in February. Instead, she read her memoirs as part of the research.

“She writes so well and she makes something so alien, this whole world of working in a mortuary, so accessible,” says Merchant.

“It was so interesting to see what they leave out. No one died in the hour and a half of the propaganda movies that I watched. It is all very make-do and ‘come together’ and ‘dig for victory’.”

Indeed, information that was not deemed to be in the interest of the war effort was covered up.

“The drama has a pleasingly cynical overview on what was going on during the Blitz,” says Kennedy. “There was a stronger sense of society then, which is attractive to me. There isn’t really any politics in this series, but politically it is an interesting era. I think there is clarity about the period, which is very evocative.”

This two-part drama is only a pilot, but the cast hope there will be more.

“You have that nice tension between the period setting and quite vividly modern crimes and there is a huge potential for lots of stories,” says Kennedy.

And if the series is picked up, then the actor, who admits he is extremely squeamish, will set himself the task of attending a real-life autopsy.

“I read Simpson’s book, Forty Years Of Murder, which was a really good read, but so far I have only got into the psychological aspect of being a pathologist.

“I would like to do more research in the physical aspects and the gritty muckiness of it all.”