Jessica Mann obituary

The writer and broadcaster Jessica Mann, who has died aged 80, was outgoing, witty and sociable. At the same time, she was self-questioning and restless, always looking for the next challenge.

Every couple of years, from A Charitable End (1971) to The Stroke of Death (2016), she produced a crime novel – 22 in all. Without being autobiographical, they reflect places she had lived in and people she had known. They do not have a consistent sleuthing protagonist, though the secret agent and archaeologist Tamara Hoyland appears in six of them.

Jessica was also committed to public service, sitting on employment tribunals (1977-2007), active in the 1970s and 80s on various health authorities and committees, an Environment Department planning inspector (1990-93) and chair of the customer services committee of the water regulator Ofwat for the south-west (1993-2001).

This was the region she represented on BBC Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz – she lived in Cornwall with her husband, the archaeologist Charles Thomas, and they brought up their four children there. Other Radio 4 programmes found her, for instance, investigating the case of Agatha Christie in order to establish why genteel women are so good at murder (as also in her book Deadlier Than the Male, 1981), and discussing current affairs on Any Questions?; on television she appeared on Question Time. A fixed point in her wide-ranging journalism was her Crime Round-up in the Literary Review, which continued until this month. Born in London, Jessica was the daughter of Lore (Eleonore, nee Ehrlich) and Francis Mann, both non-practising Jews who became exiles from Nazi Germany in 1933 and re-established themselves as lawyers in Britain. With invasion a real possibility in 1940, Jessica and her brother, David, two years older, became part of the extraordinary evacuation of children to North America that she wrote about in Out of Harm’s Way (2005). In this strictly historical study, she almost fades into the background, claiming amnesia about detailed experiences because of her extreme youth.

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And yet, in a carefully concealed coda, Jessica explained herself as fully as she ever did. That three-year childhood wartime evacuation to Canada was at the heart of things: “A fear of abandonment might explain my early [at 21] and long-lasting marriage; maybe the separation from my mother caused me to feel I should stay at home to look after my four children; perhaps the sensation of being an outsider turned me into a novelist and an awareness of life’s insecurity made me choose to write crime fiction, using it to lay my own demons.” The writer solved her own mystery.

At the age of 17, she and three friends from St Paul’s girls’ school, west London, joined an archaeological dig in Cornwall. On arriving, Jessica encountered Charles for the first time. Once she had gained a degree in archaeology and Anglo-Saxon (1959) at Newnham College, Cambridge, they got married.

At first they lived in Edinburgh, where Charles was a lecturer at the university. In 1967 he became the first professor of archaeology at Leicester University, where Jessica converted to her real interest, the law, taking an LLB degree. After four years there, Charles was appointed the first director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, initially sited at Pool, in the west of his native county.

They made their home, Lambessow, near Truro, a rich gallery of Cornish art and life. Almost every wall had a painting or sketch of the Godrevy lighthouse near St Ives. On the cliffside overlooking the lighthouse, Charles had carried out one of his early digs – the one Jessica had volunteered for – and together they wrote the book Godrevy Light (2009). At the total eclipse of the sun in August 1999, they gathered family and friends there (I had known Jessica since 1956) to witness the oncoming darkness and silence as it hurtled towards us across St Ives bay.

Evacuation influenced Jessica in many ways. She recorded that on her return to Britain in 1943, her mother was aghast at the “Americanised doll” facing her: Jessica was put into shorts and had her hair clipped to above the ears. In revenge, she became a fastidious, stylish dresser who favoured dresses by Jean Muir – though her love of clothes, too, was subject to characteristic self-examination. Many more questions came with her book The Fifties Mystique (2012), detailing the boredom, frustration and shame Jessica felt as a full-time wife and mother, recognising “the problem that has no name” identified by Betty Friedan in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Examining how the situation had changed for succeeding generations left her in no doubt that the 50s and 60s were not the good old days.

Charles died in 2016. Jessica is survived by her children, Richard, Martin, Susanna and Lavinia, her sister, the writer and publisher Nicola Beauman, seven granddaughters and four grandsons.