In Memoriam
September 1937 - 11 July 2018
Crime writer, reviewer, journalist and broadcaster Jessica
Mann has died at the age of 80 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
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©Jessica Mann
Born in London in 1937, Jessica was the daughter of Fritz
and Lore Mann who had fled Nazi Germany in October 1933. With the prospect of a
Nazi invasion of England in 1940, the two-year-old Jessica and her four-year
brother were evacuated to America but returned to London in 1943 where Jessica
learned ‘the received pronunciation and authoritative intonation of the St
Paul’s Girls’ School voice’. She read archaeology at Cambridge and then law at
Leicester University, but her first love appeared to be archaeology. Not only
was her best-known fictional detective, Tamara Hoyland, an archaeologist but
she married one – Professor Charles Thomas, noted for his excavations at
Tintagel in Cornwall where the couple lived for much of their long married
life.
Her freelance journalism, features, travel writing and
reviews, have appeared in most national newspapers and magazines and as a
broadcaster she appeared on Any Questions, Round Britain Quiz and Start the
Week. She wrote more than twenty crime novels but will probably be best
remembered for her non-fiction works; about female crime writers (Deadlier Than The Male), on evacuee
children during WWII (Out of Harm’s Way)
and on the position of women in post-war Britain (The Fifties Mystique).
Since the death of Phillip Oakes in 2005, she has
reviewed crime fiction for the Literary Review,
but I first met her in 1989 when she had just been replaced as the crime
reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. It
was a frosty first meeting, as I was the person who had replaced her – and the
petite Jessica could be very frosty when the need arose. This did not stop us
becoming friends. Jessica wrote kind reviews about my books and I had the
pleasure of getting one of her titles, Funeral
Sites, back into print as a Top Notch Thriller. (Originally published in
1981, the novel is a feminist take on The
39 Steps and on first publication was enthusiastically reviewed by Reginald
Hill.)
When I was researching a novel set in sub-Roman Britain,
Jessica acted as a go-between with her husband Professor Thomas, a noted
authority on the period, who answered many of my idiotic questions. We also
swapped notes on crime novels featuring archaeology and one of my abiding
memories of her was sitting in the audience with her at a well-known crime
fiction convention during a panel discussion on archaeology and crime. When it
became clear that not one of the four featured authors actually had any
experience (at all) of archaeological fieldwork, Jessica began fuming and her
blood pressure was only lowered when I suggested, after fifteen minutes, that
we break for the bar!
On the death of her husband, Jessica moved back to London
and became a familiar face on the publishing social scene, although she was not
afraid of offending – even boycotting – those crime writers whom she felt
employed gratuitous violence, especially against women, in their fiction.
She
also served on the CWA Committee and as Secretary to the Detection Club. Her thirteenth novel A Private Enquiry was shortlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger.
