The Volackis themselves are among the few who think that Mahmood is innocent. These include his landlord and an elderly lady who testifies against Mahmood at his trial after finding out that the Volackis have offered a handsome reward for anyone who can lead them to the murderer. We know from the start that Mahmood is innocent he is dragged into suspicion not through any hard evidence but because of the racism of the police, who are all too happy to lap up the dubious testimonies given to them by opportunists and enemies of Mahmood. Mohamed offers a bleak view of the British justice system at the time. Police turn up at Mahmood’s rented lodgings, stating that ‘a coloured man is believed responsible’, and although a preliminary search of his room reveals nothing suspicious, a few days later Mahmood is arrested. One evening she is found by her sister, Diana, in the family shop with her throat slashed. Lily Volpert is fictionalised here as Violet Volacki. He has an estranged wife, Laura, who is white (their marriage has caused consternation in the community, not least to Laura’s grandmother), as well as three children. He’s a loner, hardened by his time at sea, who now gambles, drinks and thieves.

When we meet him in a milk bar at the start of the novel it is 1952 and 24-year-old Mahmood has not stepped foot on a boat for three years.

The Fortune Men is inspired by a similar miscarriage of justice associated with the area: that of a Somali man named Mahmood Mattan, who in 1952 was convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert, a Jewish shop owner.

They were exonerated fifteen years later and the case has become known as one of the British justice system’s most notorious failures. Three black and mixed-race men were eventually convicted of her murder. In February 1988, a twenty-year-old woman named Lynette White was killed in Tiger Bay. But as well as being a place of opportunities, the area was a hotbed of crime, the boats leaving the harbour every day doubling up as getaway vehicles for those who had caused mischief during their stop-offs.

This continued into the 1950s, when, as the British-Somali author Nadifa Mohamed writes in her third novel, The Fortune Men, ‘an army of workers’ was ‘pulled in … to replace the thousands of mariners lost in the war: dockers, tallymen, kickers, stevedores, winch men’. As coal production boomed in the 19th century, the area became an industrial hub, with people from all over the world putting down roots. C ardiff’s Tiger Bay has a claim to be one of the oldest multicultural communities in the UK.

The fortune men review