DEATH IN THE AIR

In the vein of Erik Larson’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY and Dan Fagin’s TOMS RIVER comes Kate Winkler Dawson’s DEATH IN THE AIR: The True Story of the Great Smog, a Serial Killer and the Strangling of a City.

London in 1952 was a far cry from the glittering global city it is today. Still recovering from the devastation wrought by World War II, rationing was still in effect, rates of crime and unemployment were high and the national economy was in shambles. In an effort to repay its massive war debt, the British government was selling its clean burning coal to America, and Londoners were forced to make do with the cheap brown coal.

That winter, as the weather turned bitter, buses, trucks and automobiles, a dozen massive coal-fueled power stations and thousands upon thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. Dense fogs, nicknamed peasoupers, had long been a fact of London winters, but the smog that descended on December 5th of 1952 was different. A perfect storm of climactic conditions—a slow moving front, a mass of freezing air—produced a sulfurous smog that held the city hostage for five long days. Mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets and some 12,000 people, many of them elderly or ill, died. What would later be called the Great Smog of 1952 remains one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time.

That same December, there was another killer at large in London, one who would ultimately steal the spotlight from a slow moving, unrealized (and then roundly denied) catastrophe. John Reginald Christie murdered at least seven women in his flat in Notting Hill—luring women to his home with the promise of a home remedy for bronchitis, instructing his victims to inhale carbon-monoxide laden coal gas until they passed out. He then raped and strangled them, burying two in the garden, stashing several more in a papered-over kitchen alcove, and his wife of 34 years beneath the floorboards of their parlor.

The arrest of the “Beast of Rillington Place” caused a media frenzy; moreover, Christie’s role in sending an innocent man to the gallows was the impetus for the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. The smog, meanwhile, was slow to be implicated. Indeed, the British government did their level best to disavow any connection between the death rate and the air quality, blaming the sudden spike in deaths on fictitious flu epidemic. Eventually, however, the media and one crusading Member of Parliament launched a fight that would be the beginning of the global clean air movement. The Clean Air Act of 1956 was a direct result of the Great Smog, and that legislation provided a model for the rest of the world, including the US.

In a braided narrative that draws on extensive interviews, never-before published material and archival research, University of Texas journalism professor Kate Winkler Dawson recounts the intersecting stories of the these two killers and their crimes. Following five ordinary Londoners and one extraordinary predator through the smog and its aftermath, Dawson tells a gripping story of murder, environmental disaster and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing.

Kate Winkler Dawson is a seasoned documentary producer, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WCBS News and ABC News Radio, Fox News Channel, United Press International, PBS NewsHour and Nightline. You can read more about Dawson and the book at: http://www.katewinklerdawson.com.