Today’s the day Nancy Maidstone is going to hang.In her time, she’s been a wartime evacuee, land-girl, slaughterhouse worker, supermarket assistant, Master Butcher and defendant accused of first degree murder. Now she’s a prisoner condemned to death. A first time for everything.The case has made all the front pages. Speculation dominates every conversation from bar to barbershop to bakery. Why … to bakery. Why did she do it? How did she do it? Did she actually do it at all? Her physical appearance and demeanour in court has sparked the British public’s imagination, so everyone has an opinion on Nancy Maidstone.
The story of a life and a death, of a post-war world which never had it so good, of a society intent on a bright, shiny future, and of a woman with blood on her hands.
This is the story of Nancy Maidstone.
”From its chilling opening as a death sentence is passed, this book had me gripped. The 1950s setting, the entirely believable characters and the tight plot all held me as, fully engrossed, for the first time I went in the wrong direction on the Tube. Thoroughly recommended”. – Dr Alison Baverstock, Associate Professor of Publishing, Kingston University, London
more
I reviewed this book via an ARC from the author, for Rosie Amber’s Review Team. The fact that it was free has not affected this honest review.
My understanding is that this long novella is a book mentioned in a novel by JJ Marsh, a work written by one of her characters, Vaughan Mason. Though not clear on the blurb, this is what Rosie told me she thought it was, when I chose the book to review.
An Empty Vessel is most interesting story that depicts the thoughts of Nancy Maidstone, a woman accused of murder 1958, the day before her execution, and her life from childhood up until that point. Other chapters are from the point of view of her lawyers and others involved in the plot.
JJ Marsh has a highly readable and compelling writing style and has created characters that jump off the page, with excellent dialogue, both spoken and inner, from the thoughtful Doctor Waterhouse and his socially self-aware wife, to Nancy’s self-serving brother, Frank, to the women she worked with at the supermarket that led to the abrupt downturn in her life, to Nancy herself, for whom my sympathy increased the more I read. Every character story is a tale within itself, rather than just a part of the whole, and I was completely engrossed in each one.
The story gives a colourful picture of ordinary life in the 1950s, with all its social prejudices, accepted behaviour and sometimes almost charming innocence about the world. Running through all the scenarios is the question of whether or not Nancy is guilty, and if so, why she would have committed such a crime, but there is so much more to enjoy than simply an amassing of clues.
An entertaining, heartbreaking and unusual story – I loved it.
This beautifully-penned story, the author’s literary prose and the unusual plotline of An Empty Vessel had me hooked right from the beginning.
The main character, Nancy Maidstone, is a prisoner facing death for murder, at the end of the 1950s. Nancy’s unfortunate appearance and her odd behaviour garner her no supporters, but the fact remains: did she really commit this crime?
How does this seemingly unsympathetic character gain the reader’s total sympathy? Why do we feel heartbroken for her, only wishing we could do something to help her out of her hopeless predicament?
I believe it’s all down to the author’s skill in exposing us to subtle insights of Nancy and her life that, had she drawn a different hand of cards, may have been totally different.
The story of Nancy Maidstone is compassionate, tragic and disturbing. It’s an easy to read story that stayed with me long after I reached The End.
A deviation from the author’s highly successful Beatrice Stubbs crime novels, An Empty Vessel is a winner in its own right.
Having enjoyed several of JJ Marsh’s excellent Beatrice Stubbs crime novels, I had no idea what to expect from An Empty Vessel, as it is apparently a book written by a character in one I haven’t yet read. I discovered it was about a woman sentenced to death for murder at the end of the 1950s and was immediately intrigued.
It blew me away. Firstly, it is beautifully written, expressive, compassionate and full of page-turning pace. This in itself is quite a feat, as we know from the start that Nancy is about to be hanged.
On the surface she is also an unsympathetic character, overweight and ungainly, shy, lacking social graces and often uncomfortable in the company of others. Yet Nancy increasingly draws our sympathy. There are hints of a life that might have been in other circumstances – a young farm-hand sweet on her, Mr Field the master butcher asking her out for a drink before events overtake her, the death of her mother forcing her to dedicate herself to her ailing father’s care. Circumstances conspire against Nancy and her personal history has left her without allies and self confidence.
All the minor characters are beautifully drawn, so that they live and breathe on the page. It is also a pitch perfect encapsulation of those times: the painfully slow recovery from a devastating war, the gradual dawn of a new age – Nancy’s job in one of the first of Britain’s supermarkets, the arrival of television sets in many homes. This is a London where today’s Docklands financial centre was then a lunar landscape of empty bombed out warehouses, weeds, barbed wire and bomb craters.
An Empty Vessel is a book of subtlety and nuance that at the same time pulls no punches Highly recommended!