Entries in the Metropolitan Police Registers of Deaths by Violence sound a monotonous, mournful dirge of families perished in murder-suicides, children poisoned by parents, women dead from botched abortions, and lovers destroyed by violent rage. Amy Bell's Murder Capital is the first attempt to weave together these random tales of desperation and woe into a meaningful narrative about how the Second World War fundamentally altered the commission and forms of metropolitan violence.

Based upon her study of 953 deaths by violence in London between 1933 and 1953, Bell argues that wartime conditions reconfigured the act of murder: before the Blitz most parties to murder were intimates; thereafter, killing by strangers became more pronounced. In Bell's telling the wartime metropolis teems with refugees, servicemen, and deserters whose violent depredations were cause and consequence of the conflict's physical and psychological toll on civil society. Postwar readjustment further modified patterns of murder: on the one hand, greater provision of social services (particularly for mothers) diminished numbers of infanticides and deaths from abortion; on the other, masculine identities brutalized by war found new expressions in gang-related murders and shooting deaths. Bell locates her social history of murder within London's spatial and institutional landscapes, too, in order to show how the police and public perceived violent deaths in, say, seedy Soho differently from those committed in tony Chelsea, and how the built environment and its wartime ruination shaped where perpetrator met victim and where crimes were concealed.

Drawing from police files for approximately 150 of the 953 cases, in addition to newspapers, memoirs, and autobiographies, Bell exhumes new revelations about London's crime history and grounds her research in an impressively wide range of reading on forensics, policing, geography, and criminology. Chapters 4 and 5 stand out as the most original contributions to the field: here we learn that fully one-third of all violent deaths in London from 1933 to 1953 were due to illegal abortions and infanticides. These chapters are valuable not only for the spotlight Bell shines on such underreported and understudied offences, but for her thorough detective work in reconstructing their social history and explaining the factors that shaped their recording, investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and punishment.

For all Bell gains from her fascinating sources, however, she sometimes concedes in analytic clarity. Indeed, Bell's title doubly misleads. First, the book is not exclusively or even primarily about murder, but rather about offences that were frequently not treated as murder: the aforementioned deaths from abortion and infanticide only occasionally became “murder” in the eyes of police, prosecutor, judge, and jury; and the same can be said of many other violent deaths depending on whether charges were thrown out, the death was ruled to have been justifiable homicide, or the judicial result reclassified the death as manslaughter. (Bell excludes many other violent deaths, including political murders and vehicular manslaughter, which feature on the police registers.) Second, not all deaths in the register were “suspicious,” a label that proves too porous to sustain as a category of analysis. Bell rather unhelpfully defines “suspicious death” as “unexpected deaths whose circumstances required further investigation” (1) or discovery of corpses “under suspicious circumstances” before concluding more fruitfully that the wider social context ultimately determined a death's suspiciousness (50). As a result the chapters that describe these cryptic “suspicious deaths” in successive periods (1933–39, 1939–45, and 1945–53) do not cohere nearly as well as the impressive chapters 4 and 5: the latter chapters, which bridge the entire time period and focus specifically on abortion and infanticide, demonstrate more assuredly how police counting procedures and changes in the law (among other shifts) made these criminal categories fluid. One wonders, too, why Bell neglects the registers of violent death that exist in the National Archives for the period from 1891 to 1932 (MEPO [Metropolitan Police] 20/1 and 20/2).

Elsewhere Bell's ambitious claims overleap her evidence. For instance, Bell sees crime scene photography as central to constructing ideas about urban violence. Though of great interest in thinking about visual representations of crime, the nature of the sources reproduced in the text hamstrings her argument: the photographs have been buried at the National Archives, and we are not informed whether they ever saw the light of day, how prosecutors might have used the images in court, or how these photographs related to other and perhaps more powerful visual representations in print media and film. And for as much as Bell aspires to revive the “vernacular London . . . of life as it was lived and as it was taken” (199), she leans heavily on official geographies (the police division, crime scene photography) and juridical languages (police and courts) while looking only superficially at the true metropolitan vernacular: the London press. A more systematic investigation of how newspapers mapped geographies of murder and shaped suspicions of violent crime would further invigorate Bell's fascinating study.