cornelia's Full Review: Denis Burges - Graves Gates
Dennis Burges has penned a strong debut with Graves Gate, his richly atmospheric mystery set in 1920s London.
When young American journalist Charles Baker receives an invitation to meet privately with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, father of a close friend killed in the trenches of WWI, he agrees immediately. The revered author asks for Baker’s help on a confidential matter of some urgency—a note requesting that one of three strangers be shepherded to the prison cell of a woman slated to hang for murder within the week.
For Doyle, the note could be life-altering on an entirely different level. Possibly written by the doctor who treated his artist father in an insane asylum years earlier, it refers to a lurid sketch by Doyle the elder which that doctor destroyed in young Arthur’s presence--before anyone else had seen it. Since both doctor and patient are long dead and the note is written on a contemporary newspaper, the famed author knows he may at last have proof of communication from beyond the grave.
Recently vilified for his public support in The Strand magazine of supposed “fairy” photographs, however, Doyle doesn’t want to risk humiliation (nor publicity damage to his beloved Spiritualist movement) should the message turn out to be a hoax.
Baker, a young war veteran made even more cynical by his work for the Associated Press, has no doubt that Spiritualism is a load of hooey, but agrees to pursue the matter out of respect for Doyle and the memory of his fallen comrade. Joined in his quest by the striking--and married--society woman with whom he is unrequitedly in love, Baker must race to discover whether those who want him dead are themselves still among the living.
This is no novel for the Faint of Woo-woo, but Burges handles the supernatural with literary elegance and aplomb. Readers are thrown some finely wrought metaphysical curveballs, all of them as snappy as they are uncanny. While I had one or two tiny quibbles with anachronistic detail (such as whether or not an upper class British chick in the 1920s would whip up a meal of “pasta,” if she had the slightest clue how to cook in the first place), this was a riveting, character-driven read from start to finish.
I recommend Dennis Burges highly and look forward to what I hope are a slew of sequels.
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