In 1940, when Jessica Mann was a two-year-old toddler, she was evacuated to Canada with her four-year-old brother. As an adult, she had no recollection of the three years she spent abroad (two in Canada and one in the US); they were just a blank. She would later say that her first memory was meeting “the strangers who were my parents” when they came to collect her on her arrival back in London.
Mann, who has died aged 80, might have erased that difficult period from her memory, but the trauma stayed with her: maternal deprivation is a theme that recurs in her books. She even made it the speciality of one of her sleuths, child psychiatrist Dr Fidelis Berlin, who, like her, had been separated from her Jewish parents in the war.
Likewise, in Telling Only Lies — a dark but gripping yarn set in pre-war Germany, and Mann’s favourite among her novels – the protagonist Perdita Whitchurch grows up virtually motherless. But all of Mann’s 22 crime novels are peppered with elements taken from her own life, whether it is an interest in archaeology or a penchant for appearing on TV panels.
Although classified as murder mysteries, her books are far more than mere “whodunnits”. Her novels, as Mann herself said, concentrated on people and places. “Puzzles”, as she called them, came last. Which explains why her 1986 book, A Kind of Healthy Grave, was the first murder mystery to be longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Jessica Dorothea Esther Mann was the daughter of Eleonore (Lore) Ehrlich and Frederick Mann, two Jewish lawyers who had left Nazi Germany for the UK in 1933. Both retrained in English law; Frederick became an authority on international law while Lore set up a legal-aid practice.
However, having experienced Nazism themselves, when a German invasion of Britain appeared a possibility the Manns decided not to take chances and opted to send their children to North America.
That decision would be later explored by Mann in the non-fiction Out of Harm’s Way, a much praised chronicle of the evacuation, for which she interviewed other child evacuees including Shirley Williams and Elizabeth Taylor.
Mann’s own legacy would be — as she self-diagnosed — a fear of abandonment and need for security: she married early, at 21, barely days after gaining her degree in Archaeology and Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, and chose to be a stay-at-home mum to her four children.
However, she never bought into the 1960s housewife’s dream, as made clear by her 2012 “polemical memoir” The Fifties Mystique.
Utterly bored and frustrated, she came up with the idea of writing murder mysteries, the first of which, A Charitable End, was published in 1971.
An articulate woman who was not scared of voicing her opinions, Mann would often pop up on programmes such as Any Questions? and the Round Britain Quiz. She was also a newspaper columnist and reviewer.
Jessica Mann married Professor Charles Thomas in 1971. He died in 2016. She is survived by her children, Richard, Martin, Susanna and Lavinia, and 11 grandchildren.
JULIE CARBONARA
Jessica Mann, born September 13, 1937. Died July 10, 2018
