Alien Saddler's Bless 'Em All is subtitled A Blitz novel. Its emphasis is on the eternally absorbing paradox, in Second World War London, of ordinary lives pursuing their respective courses against a background of communal loss and annihilation. Booksellers Bernard and Maurice Green; their invoice clerk Rosa Tcherny, “a bit of all right”; perky Jimmy the office boy, with his taste for pork-dripping and the Gem magazine; Bunty, on the game up West; and Gloria, the resting actress whose dramatic quietus owes nothing to the Luftwaffe: none of them is conspicuous for courage or glamour. What matters to them all is being “free to act natural”, as Jimmy puts it, even if, like the hotel porter Bert Penrose, they should end up minus a spouse and a leg.
Alien Saddler carefully avoids any hint of “London can take it” Cockney-sparrer sentimentality. The baldness of his characters’ conversational exchanges is as convincing as the unemotional narrative, pared down to the sinew of an existence suddenly robbed of anything like certainty or expectation: “Edie kept coming, day after day, but she didn't bring any joy”. Even while it saves them, the mood of resignation which forms an essential ingredient of such lives has its own dangerous powers of corrosion.
Times Literary Supplement
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Whatever it is that you normally look for in a good book, Alien Saddler’s Bless ’Em All is guaranteed to have it. Jam-packed with humour, murder, lust and social history, this novel will surely have every reader's eyes popping from start to finish.
Set in the early 1940s, Bless ’Em All follows the lives of a rather eccentric collection of London residents, at the centre of which are chalk and cheese brothers, Maurice and Bernard, who cannot agree on the future of their family bookselling business. While literature lover Maurice wants to stick to the classics, Bernard’s hand in the business involves dealing sleazy backhanders of supposed “photographic art” and D H Lawrence (considered vulgar at the time) to the sketchy back streets of Soho.
Meanwhile an unlikely friendship forms between housewives, Bunty and Betty. A beautiful blonde bombshell, Bunty is completely deaf and dumb. The moment her husband goes to work each morning, a lavishly dressed Bunty prepares to spend her day dancing in the hottest hostess club in Soho. Bunty'’s neighbour is young, naive, new to married life and very bored. Caught. up in the excitement of Bunty’s glamorous clothes and glitzy lifestyle, Betty doesn’t really realize what she is letting herself in for. Throw into this mix some more brilliantly well-crafted characters, the tension of the blitz and a turn of extraordinary events and you’ve got a blast of a read.
A respectable journalist with four novels, many children’s stories, TV programmes and radio monologues under his belt, Allen Saddler’s experience and talent as a writer is clear in this latest release. His style is intriguing, humorous and easy to read. But what really makes Bless ’Em All a compulsive page-turner is its sense of realism. Having spent the war years in London himself, Saddler seems to invest some personal experiences within his fictionalised tale. A tiny bit Desperate Housewives, a tad EastEnders and a pinch Midsomer Murders, Bless ’Em All is a superior, unisex version of a soap opera. This engaging novel will suit anyone who is just a little bit nosey.
Debbie Green, Big Issue
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This riotous wartime tale of prostitution, romance, murder and the old-fashioned business of selling books comes from a Devon author with excellent credentials in journalism and writing for radio and television.
It is a portrait of a cross section of London society during the Blitz, revealing that they were not heroic in the conventional sense and that most regarded the bombing as an intrusion, a nuisance to be endured.
With its wealth of quirky characters, this highly entertaining novel exposes the misplaced optimism, naked opportunism and matrimonial misdemeanour in a comic tour de force of considerable verve, perceptiveness and period authority.
Western Morning News
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Sarah Waters take note. This is how to write a Blitz novel. In last year’s disappointing Night Watch, Waters tried to portray the drama and the drabness of war-time London and ended up just writing drably. Saddler successfully interweaves the tales of a collection of lower class Londoners, and their connections through work, love and lust – with a pair of relatively well-to-do brothers in the book trade. The bombs begin to fall. Some characters end badly, some well and some, literally, soldier on. Saddler has a touch of the Orwells about his pure, clear prose, which is particularly effective in painting London itself as a backdrop to this moving story of a mundane world suddenly gone mad.
Joe Cushley, What’s On In London
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I've just finished Bless & feel very sad as I didn't want it to end. I absolutely adored it. You took me into another England, another London.Your descriptions of living through the blitz were amazing & scary, I loved all the characters & got completely absorbed in their lives. Congratulations on a really good book. Hope sales are going well. Looking forward to the next. Happy Easter, Love Twiggy.
