Two Killers in the Fog: A Review of Death in the Air

In Death in the Air, Kate Winkler Dawson revisits London’s deadly winter of 1952, when a suffocating layer of coal smoke and fog settled over the city for five days. The disaster brought transportation to a standstill, overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes, and contributed to thousands of deaths. At roughly the same time, serial killer John Reginald Christie was concealing a different kind of horror inside his home at 10 Rillington Place.

Dawson braids these events together as the stories of two killers. One was a man who preyed upon vulnerable women; the other was a toxic atmosphere created by coal consumption, industrial pollution, unfavorable weather, and political complacency. Both operated behind a screen of obscurity. Christie depended on secrecy and manipulation, while the smog literally prevented Londoners from seeing what surrounded them.

The comparison provides Death in the Air with a memorable premise and an appropriately ominous atmosphere. Dawson combines true crime, environmental history, medicine, politics, and postwar social history in a book that is both accessible and disturbing. Its two narratives are not always equally compelling or naturally connected, but together they form a vivid portrait of a city in which death could remain hidden even when it was occurring on an enormous scale.

A City That Could Not Breathe

The Great Smog began on December 5, 1952, when unusual weather conditions trapped London’s polluted air close to the ground. Coal-burning domestic fireplaces, power stations, factories, and vehicle exhaust helped create a dense mixture of smoke and moisture. London had long been associated with fog, but this was not merely picturesque weather. It was a toxic environmental emergency.

Dawson reconstructs the physical experience of the smog in frightening detail. Visibility became so poor that people struggled to find their way through familiar neighborhoods. Traffic slowed or stopped. Public transportation was disrupted, ambulances could not operate normally, and indoor events were affected when pollution entered buildings. Pedestrians sometimes discovered that they could not see their own feet.

More frightening than the darkness was the effect on human lungs. The elderly, infants, and people with existing respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses were especially vulnerable. Hospitals filled with patients who could not breathe, while deaths accumulated faster than officials initially understood or publicly acknowledged.

Dawson’s storytelling emphasizes that the catastrophe did not arrive with a spectacular explosion or a clearly identifiable moment of destruction. It developed quietly. People coughed, became disoriented, collapsed, or died at home. The emergency was dispersed across countless rooms, streets, clinics, and hospitals. Its very scale made it difficult to perceive.

That quality distinguishes the Great Smog from more visually dramatic disasters. There was no single ruined structure to photograph and no obvious boundary separating the disaster zone from the rest of the city. The city itself became the disaster zone, and the atmosphere necessary for life became an instrument of death.

The Second Killer

Running parallel to the environmental narrative is the story of John Reginald Christie, one of Britain’s most infamous murderers. Christie presented himself as quiet and respectable, but behind that ordinary exterior was a manipulative predator who targeted women and concealed bodies in and around his residence.

Dawson follows Christie’s personal history, his relationships, his methods, and the gradual exposure of his crimes. His outward appearance of normality was central to his ability to avoid suspicion. He did not resemble the popular image of a violent monster. He was unassuming, physically unimpressive, and capable of appearing helpful or authoritative when it served him.

His victims often occupied socially vulnerable positions, which made them easier to deceive and less likely to receive serious institutional protection. Christie exploited trust, isolation, financial insecurity, illness, and the limited options available to women in postwar Britain. His crimes therefore cannot be separated entirely from the social conditions surrounding them.

The Christie sections offer the book’s most recognizable true-crime material: deception, murder, hidden remains, police failures, and eventual discovery. Yet Dawson avoids turning him into a glamorous criminal mastermind. What emerges is not a figure of dark genius but a predatory, dishonest man whose success depended heavily on other people underestimating him.

The setting of 10 Rillington Place adds a claustrophobic intensity. The cramped rooms and neglected surroundings become part of the horror. Christie’s domestic space, like London’s atmosphere, hides death in plain sight. Respectability functions as his personal fog, obscuring violence behind an ordinary façade.

The Troubling Case of Timothy Evans

Any serious account of Christie must also confront the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans. Evans lived at the same address with his wife, Beryl, and their infant daughter, Geraldine. When Beryl and Geraldine were killed, Evans became the principal suspect and was ultimately executed.

Christie’s role in the case—and his later exposure as a serial murderer—raised grave doubts about Evans’s conviction. The affair became one of the most notorious examples of the dangers of capital punishment and the fallibility of the British justice system.

Dawson treats this part of the story as more than a dramatic legal reversal. It illustrates how class, education, credibility, and institutional confidence can determine whose account is believed. Evans was poorly equipped to defend himself against an investigation that quickly settled on him as the likely culprit. His inconsistent statements damaged his credibility, but those inconsistencies existed within a broader context of pressure, confusion, and limited intellectual resources.

Christie, by contrast, could appear composed and cooperative. He understood how to make himself useful to authorities and how to present his version of events convincingly. His performance of respectability carried weight, even though he was precisely the person whose testimony warranted profound skepticism.

The case exposes a recurring problem in criminal justice: investigators may interpret ambiguity as confirmation once they have committed themselves to a theory. Evidence is then filtered through the assumption of guilt rather than used to test that assumption.

Evans’s execution gives the Christie narrative a significance extending beyond the murders themselves. The state did not merely fail to recognize a dangerous killer. It may have imposed the ultimate punishment on the wrong man while relying in part on the credibility of the actual murderer. That possibility helped transform the case into an enduring argument against capital punishment.

Two Forms of Invisibility

The central device of Death in the Air is the comparison between Christie and the Great Smog. Both are described as killers, and both benefited from an inability—or unwillingness—to see.

Christie hid behind social conventions. He appeared ordinary and respectable enough to escape sustained scrutiny. His victims could disappear without producing the urgent response that might have followed if they had been wealthier or more socially prominent.

The smog was physically visible, yet the causes of its lethality remained politically obscured. Londoners knew that coal smoke fouled the air, but pollution had been normalized as an unavoidable feature of urban and industrial life. Familiarity diminished the sense of danger. The atmosphere was unpleasant, but it was also associated with warmth, employment, industry, and the daily functioning of the city.

Dawson’s larger argument is that catastrophe does not always depend on complete secrecy. Sometimes the necessary facts are known but disconnected. A woman disappears, but no pattern is recognized. Respiratory deaths rise, but officials do not immediately attribute them to pollution. A witness seems suspicious, but his respectable appearance protects him. A city’s air is visibly contaminated, but the contamination is accepted until the death toll becomes impossible to ignore.

The metaphor is effective because both stories concern failures of recognition. London could not see through the fog in either a literal or institutional sense.

Yet the analogy has limits. Christie intentionally murdered individual victims, while the Great Smog emerged from a combination of weather, infrastructure, fuel consumption, economic policy, and delayed regulation. Calling both “killers” is rhetorically powerful, but it risks blurring the distinction between deliberate violence and systemic negligence.

Dawson generally preserves that distinction, though the book’s marketing and structure encourage readers to view the two narratives as more directly intertwined than they really were.

Postwar London as a Character

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its portrayal of postwar London. The city in 1952 was still recovering from the Second World War. Bomb damage remained visible, housing conditions were often poor, and rationing continued to shape daily life. London was an imperial capital struggling with austerity and decline while trying to modernize its institutions.

Coal was central to this world. It heated homes and powered industry, but the cleaner grades of coal were often economically valuable and could be exported. Many residents burned cheaper, dirtier fuel. Individual households contributed to the pollution, yet their choices were constrained by cost, availability, inadequate housing, and public policy.

This context complicates any attempt to assign simple blame. The disaster was not caused by one villain pulling a lever. It arose from a system in which harmful practices were distributed among governments, industries, utilities, households, and transportation networks.

Dawson also captures the emotional legacy of wartime endurance. Londoners had survived bombing, deprivation, and loss. Stoicism was a source of collective pride, but it could also discourage alarm. A population accustomed to hardship might interpret another dangerous condition as something to be endured rather than challenged.

The city’s celebrated fogs carried cultural associations that further disguised the threat. Fog belonged to London’s literary and visual identity. It could suggest mystery, romance, or atmospheric beauty. Dawson strips away that nostalgia by showing what London fog contained and what it did to the human body.

Environmental Disaster as True Crime

Approaching the Great Smog through the conventions of true crime is one of Dawson’s most interesting choices. Instead of treating pollution as an abstract issue involving charts and regulations, she presents it as a lethal force with identifiable victims, preventable causes, and political consequences.

This framing gives environmental history urgency. The people who died were not simply statistics produced by bad weather. Their deaths emerged from decisions about fuel, housing, energy, industry, transportation, and regulation. Although no single person intended the disaster, the danger was not entirely unforeseeable.

The book also demonstrates why environmental deaths are difficult to count. When a person is strangled, the immediate cause may be apparent. When pollution worsens respiratory disease or contributes to heart failure, responsibility is more diffuse. Victims may die during the event, days later, or after a prolonged decline. Official estimates can therefore understate the true consequences.

This uncertainty benefits institutions inclined to minimize responsibility. If every death cannot be individually connected to the smog with absolute confidence, authorities can present the event as unfortunate weather rather than a policy failure. Dawson shows how epidemiology and statistical analysis became necessary tools for making a dispersed disaster visible.

The environmental narrative ultimately becomes a story about evidence. Bodies existed, hospitals were crowded, and funeral services were overwhelmed, but transforming those experiences into public action required proof that officials could not easily dismiss.

Government Delay and Public Responsibility

The political response to the smog forms one of the book’s most consequential threads. Officials did not immediately treat the event as a major national disaster, partly because the full mortality was not yet clear and partly because meaningful action would require changes to energy use, industry, and domestic heating.

Environmental reform is rarely a matter of simply recognizing that pollution is harmful. Governments must decide who will pay for cleaner technology, whether households can afford new heating systems, how industry will be regulated, and what economic disruption is acceptable. These practical questions can become excuses for inaction, especially when the victims are disproportionately elderly, ill, or poor.

Dawson portrays the eventual push toward clean-air legislation as an important legacy of the disaster. The Great Smog forced pollution out of the category of nuisance and into the category of public-health emergency. It demonstrated that environmental regulation could not depend solely on individual choice because individuals lived within systems that made dirty fuel necessary or affordable.

The book is particularly relevant because this conflict remains unresolved in many places. Air pollution is often gradual, unevenly distributed, and politically inconvenient. It rarely produces the dramatic images associated with floods, fires, or earthquakes, but its cumulative effects can be devastating.

By placing environmental policy beside homicide, Dawson insists that preventable deaths caused by polluted air deserve moral attention comparable to more conventional forms of violence. The comparison may be imperfect, but its ethical force is difficult to dismiss.

Women, Vulnerability, and Social Neglect

The Christie narrative is also a story about whose disappearance matters. His victims were not protected equally by society, and their vulnerability was part of what made them targets. Some faced financial insecurity, social stigma, housing instability, or limited control over reproductive decisions.

Dawson’s account suggests that serial killers do not operate outside society so much as exploit its existing inequalities. Christie did not create every condition that isolated his victims. He recognized those conditions and used them.

This is one of the strongest connections between the two halves of the book. Pollution also harms unequally. People with resources may relocate, improve their homes, obtain medical care, or reduce exposure. Poorer residents often have fewer choices and are more likely to live near industrial sources, depend on cheap fuel, and suffer from inadequate health care.

Both narratives therefore involve victims whose deaths could be overlooked because they occupied positions of reduced social power. Christie exploited individual vulnerability, while the polluted city exposed structural vulnerability. The mechanisms were different, but the unequal distribution of risk was similar.

The book could have developed this comparison even further. Dawson provides considerable attention to Christie, investigators, doctors, and political officials, but some victims remain less fully realized than the systems and men surrounding their deaths. That imbalance partly reflects the historical record, though it is still noticeable.

Atmosphere and Suspense

Dawson writes with a strong sense of scene. The darkness of the smog, the silence of immobilized streets, the smell of coal smoke, and the panic of suffocation give the environmental chapters an almost apocalyptic quality. The Christie sections are more intimate but equally oppressive, centered on narrow rooms, concealed spaces, and domestic trust turned into danger.

The alternating structure creates suspense by moving between large-scale and personal horror. One chapter may describe hospitals confronting a wave of respiratory emergencies, while another returns to Christie’s crimes and the legal consequences of the Evans case.

This method helps sustain momentum, particularly for readers who might not ordinarily choose a book about environmental policy. The true-crime narrative provides familiar dramatic tension, while the smog narrative expands the meaning of killing beyond the actions of one offender.

At the same time, the alternation sometimes interrupts rather than strengthens the narrative. Just as one strand gathers force, the book switches to the other. Because Christie did not cause the smog and the smog did not meaningfully determine his crimes, the connection is primarily thematic and chronological.

Readers expecting the two stories to converge in the manner of a conventional thriller may therefore be disappointed. They coexist in the same city and historical period, but they do not combine into one plot. The book is best understood as a paired history rather than an account of directly intersecting events.

Research and Accessibility

As her debut book, Death in the Air already displays many of the qualities that would characterize Dawson’s later historical true crime: extensive archival research, attention to forensic and medical detail, and an ability to translate complex historical issues into approachable narrative.

She incorporates official records, scientific findings, interviews, legal history, and contemporary accounts without making the book read like an academic monograph. Medical and environmental explanations are generally clear, and political developments are presented through their human consequences.

The book’s accessibility is a major strength. Readers do not need prior knowledge of atmospheric science, British legal history, or postwar politics. Dawson provides enough explanation to establish the stakes while keeping the narrative moving.

The tradeoff is that some subjects receive less depth than they might in a specialized work. The science of atmospheric pollution, the history of British capital punishment, and Christie’s psychology could each support an entire book. Dawson’s braided approach necessarily condenses them.

That compression will suit general readers, but those already familiar with Christie or the Great Smog may find fewer revelations than newcomers. The book’s originality lies less in uncovering an unknown event than in placing two familiar histories alongside each other.

The Limits of the Central Comparison

The concept of two killers is the book’s greatest attraction and its most significant weakness.

At a thematic level, the comparison works. Christie and the smog both killed through suffocation. Both were concealed by conditions that frustrated sight and understanding. Both exposed institutional failures. Both disproportionately harmed vulnerable people. Both changed public debates about state responsibility—Christie through capital punishment and the smog through environmental regulation.

At a causal level, however, the connection is thin. The narratives occupy the same broad moment, but their paths rarely cross. The book sometimes appears to search for transitions that will make the pairing feel more organic than it is.

This does not make either story ineffective. In fact, each is compelling enough to stand independently. The difficulty is that the reader may begin evaluating which half is more engaging. Some will prefer the forensic and legal drama of Christie’s crimes, while others will find the environmental catastrophe more original and socially important.

The smog is arguably the book’s true center. Its immense scale, neglected victims, medical consequences, and political legacy provide the most distinctive material. Christie supplies suspense and marketable true-crime appeal, but his case occasionally feels like a parallel book edited into the environmental history.

A stronger integration might have focused even more explicitly on the institutions linking the stories: class prejudice, official credibility, the invisibility of vulnerable victims, and the difficulty of proving responsibility. Those ideas are present, but the alternating chronology sometimes receives more emphasis than the deeper analysis.

Strengths

The book’s most notable strengths include:

• A vivid reconstruction of the Great Smog: Dawson makes an environmental disaster immediate and human rather than reducing it to statistics.
• A compelling portrait of postwar London: Austerity, coal dependence, damaged housing, and wartime memory all deepen the narrative.
• Accessible explanations of science and policy: Atmospheric conditions and public-health consequences are presented clearly.
• A thoughtful examination of institutional failure: Both the Evans case and the delayed response to pollution demonstrate the dangers of official certainty and indifference.
• Strong narrative atmosphere: The imagery of darkness, constriction, hidden bodies, and suffocation unifies the book emotionally even when the plots remain separate.

Dawson also succeeds in challenging narrow definitions of violent death. A serial murderer may command greater public fascination, but a preventable environmental disaster can kill on a vastly larger scale. The book asks why one form of death is readily treated as a crime story while the other is often categorized as an unfortunate accident.

Limitations

The primary limitation is structural. The two narratives are connected more by theme than by direct interaction, making the book feel divided at times. Readers drawn mainly to one subject may become impatient when the narrative shifts to the other.

The Christie material also competes with an already extensive body of writing about 10 Rillington Place and Timothy Evans. Dawson presents the case effectively, but the environmental sections feel more distinctive.

The victims could receive greater individual attention. This is especially relevant in a book that critiques the invisibility of vulnerable people. Christie remains the dominant personality in the murder narrative, while some of the women he killed are necessarily reconstructed from limited records.

Finally, the thriller-like presentation occasionally simplifies complicated questions of responsibility. Christie’s guilt is personal and intentional; responsibility for the smog is collective, systemic, and distributed across decades. Treating both as equivalent “killers” creates a strong title but not always a precise analytical framework.

Final Assessment

Death in the Air is an atmospheric and ambitious work of historical true crime that places John Reginald Christie’s murders beside the Great London Smog of 1952. Kate Winkler Dawson uses the parallel to explore suffocation in two forms: one inflicted deliberately by a serial killer and the other produced by pollution, weather, economic necessity, and political delay.

The book is most powerful when reconstructing a city rendered nearly blind by its own air. Dawson captures both the terror of the five-day emergency and the quieter injustice of its aftermath, when the scale of death took time to emerge and meaningful reform required sustained political pressure.

The Christie narrative adds legal and psychological tension, particularly through the disturbing case of Timothy Evans. It also reinforces the book’s larger concern with credibility: who is believed, whose death is noticed, and how institutions protect themselves from evidence of failure.

The two strands do not always merge naturally, and the central “two killers” concept can feel imposed on events that are primarily parallel rather than interconnected. Nevertheless, the shared themes of invisibility, suffocation, vulnerability, and institutional negligence give the book coherence.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Death in the Air is best suited to readers interested in historical true crime, environmental disasters, postwar Britain, public-health history, and miscarriages of justice. It is both a chilling account of a notorious murderer and a warning about a less theatrical but far deadlier threat: a society’s ability to normalize dangerous conditions until thousands of people have already paid the price.