London’s fog may be just one of the city’s defining characteristics. Featured in literature and the visual arts, it is at once dismal and romantic. The “pea soupers” of the winter are known to lay thickly over the city, chilling inhabitants to the bone.

In 1952, the city that began the Industrial Revolution was fueled by coal, and the air was sooty and polluted. When a dense fog rolled in in December of that year, it trapped toxins and particulates underneath it for five long days. Londoners were choked and poisoned by the very air they breathed. Six thousand died from the effects of the smog (smoky fog) that week and thousands more in the weeks to follow, even after the smog lifted. The smog hid roads and facades as well as criminal activity as London shut down due to lack of visibility and an epidemic of respiratory illness. Still recovering from World War II and about to coronate a new queen, the deadly smog crippled a city already in transition. And, as the air slowly cleared, the horrors of one house and the atrocities committed by one man came out into the open.

"DEATH IN THE AIR is best when presenting the terrible environmental chaos caused by the smog and its far-reaching implications for science and ecology."

In DEATH IN THE AIR, journalist Kate Winkler Dawson recounts a horrific moment in London when a serial murderer was at large and Londoners died as they breathed. Both killers --- the man and the smog --- strangled their victims, creating havoc and discord, and both inspired legal change in England.

On the ground floor of a bleak row house in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London lived John Reginald Christie with his wife, Ethel. Christie had bounced from job to job in his adult life, had several run-ins with the law and served time in jail for his crimes. To his neighbors and co-workers, he was a strange but non-threatening man. To the women he lured to his home with a variety of promises, especially of money in exchange for sex, he turned out to be a deranged killer. Responsible for the rapes and strangulations of at least five women, the murder of his wife, and accused of the strangulation of an upstairs neighbor and her very young daughter, Christie was prolific in his heinous actions. He was caught after abandoning his house with the bodies of his victims closed up in the walls, under the floorboards, and buried in the backyard.

Though there is no direct connection between Christie’s murders, which take place over a number of years, and the devastating fog, Dawson does her best to make one. While the smog coincides with some of Christie’s activities, he had begun killing years prior and was accused and arrested weeks later. Perhaps what is more interesting than the overlapping time frame of these events is the fact that both of them precipitated a change in English law. The smog began discussions about emissions and pollution, leading to a Clean Air Act, and Christie’s role in two murders in 1949 for which someone else was executed caused the British Parliament to suspend and rethink the death penalty (to which Christie himself was sentenced).

Dawson personalizes her otherwise gloomy and gruesome tale with accounts of a young girl whose father died because of the smog, as well as some of the scientists and doctors who were active in trying to understand it and prevent it from happening in the future. Dawson’s writing style at times clouds the substance of the story and obscures the meaning of her passages; attempts at a literary feel are not always successful here. DEATH IN THE AIR is best when presenting the terrible environmental chaos caused by the smog and its far-reaching implications for science and ecology. Christie’s story is fascinating true crime, but Dawson struggles to relate it to the more compelling account she is telling about the too-often forgotten deadly fog.