Jessica Mann
Lively and original Telegraph writer and crime novelist who decried ‘sadistic misogyny’ in the genre
JESSICA MANN, who has died aged 80, was a crime novelist, social historian and journalist, who worked frequently as a columnist and reviewer for The Daily Telegraph; all her writing was characterised by the effervescence of personality and robust distaste for conventional thinking that also became familiar to radio listeners from her appearances on Any Questions? and Round Britain Quiz.
She wrote more than 20 crime novels, and was less interested in constructing cunning plots than in ranging over as wide as possible a variety of settings and characters. “I write books … which concentrate on people, places and puzzles, in that order,” she once said.
Admirers of her understated, ironic fiction felt that she was less wellknown than she deserved, but she received a good deal of critical acclaim. One book, A Kind of Healthy Grave (1986; the title was Sydney Smith’s definition of the countryside), was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
This was so unlikely a distinction for a murder mystery that her agent had not told her the book was being submitted. Her own favourite among her novels was Telling Only Lies, set in pre-war Germany, which had, as Anita Brookner declared in The Spectator, “a mystery and an urgency which makes much of contemporary storytelling appear nerveless in comparison”.
Her leading characters often shared significant aspects of her own history. One of her sleuths, Dr Fidelis Berlin (introduced in A Private Inquiry, 1996), is a child psychiatrist who specialises in “maternal deprivation and its effects on both parents and children”, having been deeply affected by being separated from her German-jewish parents during the war – as was Jessica Mann herself.
In a later book, The Voice from the Grave (2002), Dr Berlin is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, as her creator had been. Another recurring character, the sometime secret agent Tamara Hoyland, made her debut in Funeral Sites (1981), described by one critic as a feminist take on The Thirty-nine Steps; character and author both had a passion for archaeology.
Jessica Mann was proudly opinionated and highly articulate, and after a chance encounter with a radio producer in the 1970s she became a regular panellist on Radio 4’s Any Questions? in the days when it was a forum for interesting speakers rather than politicians; she continued to appear occasionally on the programme in her seventies, and also on the television equivalent, Question Time. For many years she and the Liberal politician Lord (John) Foot made up
the West of England team on Round Britain Quiz, and she was also heard
on Woman’s Hour, Quote … Unquote and Stop the Week.
From 1986 to 1991 she had a column in The Daily Telegraph, in which she reflected on everything from the lack of women on quangos to the pleasures and perils of DIY. She was a longserving book reviewer and travel writer for The Sunday Telegraph. From 2005 until her death she was the crime fiction critic of the Literary Review.
Her book Deadlier Than the Male
(1981) was a study of the crime writers of Agatha Christie’s generation and attempted to explain why doughty middle-class women dominated the genre in its early years. “I think they felt more secure by writing down their nightmares and then carefully setting the world to rights again,” she observed in The Sunday Telegraph.
“Deep down, all these rather conservative conformists liked to think that dolly could always be put back together again.”
She noted that her own later generation of crime novelists “are far more cynical and pessimistic”.
Jessica Mann did not approve of some modern trends in crime fiction, and in 2009 was praised for speaking out against the “sadistic misogyny” prevalent in the genre, noting that a novelist friend’s publisher had insisted on putting a nubile woman’s corpse on the cover of one book even though no woman was killed in its pages; she vowed that she would review no more of the increasing number of novels in which “young women are imprisoned, bound, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or burned alive”.
Jessica Dorothea Esther Mann was born in London on September 13 1937, the daughter of FA (Frederick) Mann CBE and his wife Eleonore (née Ehrlich), known as Lore. Both parents were Jewish-german lawyers who escaped the Nazis by emigrating to Britain in 1933 and retrained in English law; Frederick was described by Lord Denning as “the most learned of … all my learned friends”, and Lore set up a legal aid solicitor’s practice at which, as a committed feminist, she allowed no men to work. Jessica’s younger sister is Nicola Beauman, the distinguished biographer and founder of Persephone Books.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, when Jessica was two, her parents decided that she and her four-year-old brother should be evacuated abroad. “[We] were put into the charge of a stranger hired to take us across the Atlantic,” she recalled. “It was a perilous journey which some evacuees did not survive. My parents thought they would never see us again.”
She spent two years in Canada and one in the United States, but the whole period remained a blank: her earliest memory, she said, was waiting at a London station “for the strangers who were my parents to come and find me.” Partly as a way of exploring her own past, she later wrote Out of Harm’s Way (2005), a highly praised history of child evacuation during the Second World War, for which she interviewed dozens of former evacuees including Shirley Williams and John Julius Norwich.
Jessica recalled in later life that “my two dreams when I was a little girl were to be the most successful woman writer in the world and to be the first woman Lord Justice.” After St Paul’s Girls’ School, she read Archaeology and Anglo-saxon at Newnham College, Cambridge, and was married within a week of taking her finals in 1959. She then studied Law at the University of Leicester, but never practised, becoming a housewife and mother instead.
She railed against rose-tinted views of a woman’s lot in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 2012 she published The Fifties Mystique, a book which she described as a polemical memoir.
“A married woman’s life was easier only in the sense that a prisoner’s life is easy – difficult choices were made for you,” she observed. “For every working mother now who fantasises about giving up work, there must have been a ‘captive wife’ then, who felt utterly bored and frustrated by full-time domesticity. I was one of them.” It was partly to stave off boredom that she wrote her first crime novel, A Charitable End, published in 1971.
Jessica Mann was an attractive woman who in her younger days was often mistaken for Leslie Caron, and she continued to look considerably younger than her age into her mid-70s. Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed in the 1990s and in her final years she was afflicted by tics: “I will often feel embarrassed because I look so peculiar,” she said last month. Nevertheless, with typical fortitude, she continued to take part in festivals and panel discussions to the end of her life.
She sat on or chaired an unusually wide range of non-literary bodies for a writer, including NHS committees and employment tribunals, and in the 1990s was a planning inspector for the Department of the Environment.
Jessica Mann was married for 57 years to Professor Charles Thomas CBE, the archaeologist, historian and founding director of the Institute of Cornish Studies. They lived in Cornwall for nearly half a century and celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 2009 by collaborating on a book about Godrevy Lighthouse. Her husband died in 2016 and she is survived by their two sons and two daughters.
Jessica Mann, born September 13 1937, died July 10 2018