Murder at the Docks

Non-Fiction

Pages: 222 Ratings:

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In 1906, in the docklands of Hong Kong, seven-year-old Enid witnessed the murder of her father.

That moment would shape the rest of her life.

Orphaned by twelve and raised in the high noon of Empire, Enid grew up amid devastating loss, brittle pretence and a way of life blind to its own impending unravelling. As war swept across the Far East, she endured the unimaginable as a civilian prisoner under Japanese occupation, emerging alive but permanently scarred.

Her survival came at a cost.

Murder at the Docks is not simply a story of violence or war. It is a story of silence—of a woman who lived through her family’s tragedy and history’s convulsions yet never spoke of them and of a grandson determined to understand what trauma, sacrifice and empire had left behind.

Spanning the Far Eastern Empire, wartime internment camps and post-war Britain, Murder at the Docks is a deeply personal excavation of memory, resilience and pervasive silence.

Richard Martin is the grandson of Enid Craik and son of Keith Martin, both survivors of separate Japanese prisoner-of-war camps whose silence shaped his childhood and led him to write this book.

Born in Pakistan and raised, first in the United States, then Britain, Richard was educated within the traditional English boarding school system before reading Economic and Social History at Edinburgh, where he focused on the making of the British middle class and post-war management decision-making. He began his career at a leading consultancy, built and flew his own aircraft, and later helped to start and build the company, Herschel Infrared. Richard draws on fifteen years of rigorous research to give his grandmother and father a voice.