Guardian Review

This assured crime debut was inspired by a notorious child murder case in New York In July 1965, during a scorching New York summer, two small, cherubic children disappeared from their mother's apartment. The little girl was found dead a few days later, her body dumped in a rubbish-strewn lot. A week or so after that her brother's body was found. The police descended and with them came the tabloids. The case -- as cases of missing blond children continue to do -- riveted the public. Two years after the murders, the mother was arrested and convicted, but the evidence was flimsy and circumstantial. This is the crime that has inspired Emma Flint's accomplished debut novel. Hers is the 10th fictional reworking of this harrowing case -- there have been novels before, plays and films. It is a reimagining that is deftly done and centres on the vivid portrait of Flint's version of the mother, Ruth Malone. Flint pulls the reader into the finely observed working-class Queens neighbourhood, where the heat shimmers on the crowded apartment buildings and the social surveillance of women is palpable. This is a place where everybody knows everybody else's business and judgment is quick and brutal. The attention of both the tabloid press and the detectives focus on Ruth from the beginning. She is divorced, she is louche, she works as a cocktail waitress; she was embroiled in a custody battle with her ex-husband; she wears makeup, she drinks, she chain smokes, she does not express grief in a way that the police or the public expect. Her housekeeping is haphazard and she has lovers. Flint captures the misogyny of the detectives, who are convinced that she -- like some cheap suburban Medea -- has murdered her own children in order to prevent her ex-husband gaining custody of them. The strongest sections of the novel allow us behind Ruth's brittle mask of makeup and pride. Flint describes her grief, loss and loneliness with a tough delicacy that is both exact and heart-wrenching. Her haphazard, nicotine-drenched good-enough mothering is wonderfully written, as is her ambition to escape the confines of the small town she left: to lead a better life, a bigger life than the one allotted her because of her sex. Whatever accusations the cops throw at her, Ruth maintains: "They knew nothing of guilt. They were not mothers." This guilt -- the one that a mother, innocent of murder, feels at her failure to protect her children -- tortures her. Ruth is watched, and judged, by everyone around her, particularly the press, and Flint makes excellent use of this. The narrative alternates between Ruth and an ambitious young tabloid journalist, Pete Wonicke, who covers the story. Flint recreates newspaper articles, police and forensic reports, blending the genres of true crime and literary fiction. The journalists and their editors make Ruth into the type of monstrous femme fatale that sells newspapers: the ways in which the prurient gaze of the press turns a woman into a witch have not changed much in the 50 years that have elapsed since the events that inspired this novel occurred. The social disapproval of Ruth's blatant sexuality and her glamour makes her guilty in the eyes of everyone except Wonicke. He becomes fascinated by her. He is, with good reason, suspicious of the police handling of the case and, like some misguided chivalric knight, he takes up her case, determined to prove her innocence. Flint uses his character to evoke both Ruth's doomed allure and the fact that her mask of makeup, her obsession with looking right, serves as a screen on to which social fantasies are projected. I thought of Ruth-- and the tragic woman who inspired her -- as a cheap facsimile of Marilyn Monroe, all candyfloss hair and illusion. A screen on to which male desire is projected; a screen that permanently hides the woman that might exist beneath the performance of femininity. The opening chapters are gripping but there is a lag in the tension in the middle section. Flint writes powerfully of Ruth's stunned grief, a grief she deadens with alcohol and sex. The last third of the book, her trial, is absolutely riveting. The ending may or may not convince you, but that is perhaps immaterial: Little Deaths is a strong and confident addition to the growing trend of domestic dystopias -- novels about flawed, angry, hurt women navigating hostile social and intimate milieus that turn viciously punitive when those women rebel. - Margie Orford.