I may have mentioned a few times that my in-laws are Welsh, as in born in Wales, so I’ve explored a bit of Welsh culture in the last few years while dabbling in the language as well. I discovered quite recently that Llenydiaeth Cymru (Literature Wales) has its own annual prizes under the Wales Book of the Year banner, and the most recent Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award went to Nadifa Mohammed for her latest novel The Fortune Men. It’s based on the true story of Somalian immigrant Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged in Cardiff, whose 1952 trial and execution for the murder of Lily Volpert were a tragic miscarriage of justice. His conviction was quashed 45 years later, followed by a payment to his family of over £700,000 and then a police apology in 2022, although by then his widow and three sons had all died.
Mohammed reimagines the time from just before the murder through the crime, arrest, and sham trial, where Mattan barely received a defense and, in the retelling, the police misconduct was appalling. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the only two people who were certain to have seen the assailant, the victim’s sister and niece, both said Mattan didn’t match their recollection. A Black man came to the door of Lily’s shop after hours, but as a moneylender as well as a seller of fabric and other odds and ends, she was accustomed to such visits. Her sister closed the door between the shop and the family’s dining room, but about twenty minutes later, someone knocked to say that her sister had been found dead, her throat slashed, and £100 taken from the safe. A combination of racism, police incompetence, and coincidence put Mattan at the center of the investigation, and once the authorities had settled on him as their man, very little could stop the wheels of justice from crushing him under their weight.
Mattan receives a fascinatingly open portrayal in this novel, as Mohammed does not canonize her subject, depicting him as a dissolute gambler and a bit of a layabout. He was a sailor who fled a suffocatingly predictable life in what was then British Somaliland, eventually taking to the seas, settling in Cardiff, and marrying Laura over her family’s objections, only to jump back on a ship almost immediately after their wedding. He’s largely out of work at the time of his arrest, only half-heartedly looking for jobs, spending what little he gets in public assistance at the horse tracks. He doesn’t pay the people who lend him money back, at least not promptly. He’s also prone to verbal outbursts that come back to bite him at the trial. Yet he’s also quite clearly innocent of the crime in question, and a loving if sometimes inattentive husband and father to three sons.
We see Mattan as a whole person, rather than just a victim of a racist society, or even just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a childlike faith that the truth will set him free in a literal sense, until it becomes clear that the British justice system is not interested in justice. Flashbacks to his childhood also lay bare the irony of a man leaving a predictable but relatively safe life in Somaliland only to move to the supposedly more enlightened colonizer country to face racism, poverty, and ultimately murder at the hands of the state.
The story, and the end, are already known, so Mohammed’s challenge is to make this story with a defined arc and conclusion interesting, which she does, while generating empathy in the reader for a relatively unsympathetic main character. Being condemned isn’t a character trait, so Mohammed fleshes out Mattan in a fascinating way to make him real and expand him beyond the common tragedy of an innocent man sent to his death. It’s a serious novel in multiple senses of the term, with a topic that seems contemporary despite the setting seventy years in the past.
Next up: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.