Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper – review

This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and murder. Françoise Dior decided that her uncle Christian had been killed in a Jewish plot in 1957, so she joined a Nazi movement in France before moving to London to work for the cause over here. Later, she got more interested in the ‘spiritual side of Nazism’, which developed into a fascination with Satan. A sexual relationship with her teenage daughter Christiane eventually turned sour and when Françoise could no longer put up with her, she tricked Christiane into committing suicide.

It’s all told in a cheerful, chatty way by Terry Cooper, who was Françoise’s lover for many years. He proudly charts his rise from ordinary Dagenham schoolboy to international adventurer. Cooper’s first great glory was when he was 11: ‘If my secondary education was of a secondary nature, my sexual education can only be called a great success.’ He had an affair with Old Mother Acid, a neighbour who had dark hair growing all over her body. She was also known as ‘You’. because her husband never called her anything else.

Although she had no breasts, I had discovered ‘You’ was exotic and beautiful; in my eyes she no longer resembled a spider… She was a naturally born mistress in the art of love.

After these halcyon days, Cooper took to posting swastikas on lampposts. He doesn’t seem to have been passionate about Nazism; in 1965, he says, the swastika represented excitement and adventure more than anything else. He’s unimpressed by the senior Nazis he comes across, reserving special disdain for Hitler’s priestess Devi Mukherji Savitri, who looks and smells like a gypsy and whose top secret Nazi plots never seem to come to anything.