Nadifa Mohamed (2021) The Fortune Men.

Around seventy years ago, Mahmood Mattan was hanged for the murder of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper, who happened to be Jewish and under five-foot tall. His conviction was found to be unsafe by the three Appeal Court judges in 1998 and he was exonerated. In the Epilogue, Mahmood’s son Omar was found dead on a beach in Caithness, Scotland. He’d said in an interview:

‘Until I was eight, I was told my father had died at sea. Then one day the Salvation Army band was playing near our house and I went out to sing with them. One of the leaders said, “We don’t need the sons of hanged men”’.

Laura Mattan was white. She was guilty of a different kind of crime. She married a black man, and had three children to him. They were part of the Tiger Bay’s Somali community that lived and worked around the docks in Tiger Bay, Cardiff.

Nadifa Mohamed offers a factional account of Mahmood Mattan’s life and death. He was guilty of being a black man. Shirley Bassey is namechecked by Berlin, Mahmood’s friend, in Tiger Bay in February 1952, as a notable reference point.

‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen,’ The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless and winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin’s Milk Bar.

Milk Bars were, as the name suggests, places that served milk. I laugh when I read about the kind of cafes my mum and dad went into that served portions of peas in vinegar. And I remember my mum screwing up her face and saying she would never eat that foreign muck—curry. The punchline for many jokes was I turned around and there was a big black man behind me. My cousin came away with that one, not so long ago, ironically, on the way to my mum’s sister’s funeral.  

Nadifa Mohamed walks in Mahmood Mattan’s supposedly blood-specked shoes. At his trial, his appointed defence lawyer described his twenty-nine-year old client as ‘this half child of nature, a semi-civilised savage’. Mahmood could speak five languages. Nadifa Mohamed gives her factional character an addiction to gambling. He notes that white women are told to scream when they see a black man, but their eyes say differently.

Lily Volpert, the murder victim, is a spinster. She lives above the shop with her family in Tiger Bay. Her sister and her niece Grace were in another room when her throat was slashed and she was murdered. Neither of them testified that the man they’d briefly seen was Mahmood Mattan.

Nadifa Mohamed inhabits the Volpert family’s life. She gives Lily Volpert an unrequited love interest, her sister’s husband. Fills in the backstory of Jewish guilt about the Holocaust and how Lily had done her bit. How another sister had went off to war. These are the least convincing parts of her narrative—and I’m not really sure they’re necessary.

The offer of a £200 reward from the Volpert family for evidence leading to the conviction of the killer certainly was.   

A witness at the trial, a neighbour of Laura Matta’s mum, for example, button-holed her and offered to go halvers on the reward money. Circumstantial evidence put the noose around Mahmood Mattan’s head. The police had their black man and they built their case around it. In the Epilogue, Harold Cover, a Jamaican who at the police’s bidding, had went a witness against Mattan, was jailed in 1969 for slashing his daughter’s throat with a razor. He only came forward as a witness when the reward was announced. Other suspects, from within the Somali community, such as Dawir Awalah, confessed to the police that he was the man they were looking for in the case, before fleeing to Brazil in 1952.  

Nadifa Mohamed writing, and inhabiting the body of Mahmood Mattan, asks herself/himself a simple question. Would I have been convicted of this killing if I was a white man? You don’t need to read a book to tell you the answer to that one, but read on.