The Sleep of Reason (1968) is an absorbing and sometimes harrowing novel in which Sir Lewis Eliot, now retired from the corridors of power and living a privileged life as a public man and a writer, enters a time of troubles which culminates in the trial in his native town of two young women, Cora Ross and Kitty Pateman, for the murder of an eight-year-old boy, Eric Mawby. C. P. Snow based the trial largely on the 1966 Moors Murders trial, which Snow’s wife, the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson (1913-80), had reported for the Sunday Telegraph and subsequently written about in a controversial book, On Iniquity (1967).
The Sleep of Reason is the tenth and penultimate novel in Snow’s …
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