Book description
A crime and a six-decade cover-up: the death of a fashion designer in the cesspit of vice and violence that was 1950s London.
In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading…
Why read it?
1 author picked Dead Fashion Girl as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Fred Vermorel’s Dead Fashion Girl is less a conventional true-crime book than a séance for a lost London. For anyone drawn to the faded glamour and grubby underbelly of post-war Britain, it’s an intoxicating read. Vermorel, a Situationist-influenced writer, deploys Townsend’s death as an excuse to probe the 1950s. What emerges is a portrait of a London both glamorous and vicious: a cesspit of vice and violence populated by the criminalised demimonde, bombsites and flick knives. The prose evokes a world of libidinous parties, frauds, nude models, pseudo-actresses, marriages of convenience—in a wonderful web transgression.
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