Heads up, lovers of period fiction. If you delight in times and mores other their your own, if you derive innocent delight from intricate details of the past, if your heart beats faster at the opportunity to immerse yourself fully into a period you were not born into, do yourself a favour and plunge headlong into this remarkable first novel from a writer more noted for his work in other media (stage, film, TV, radio).
John MacLachlan Gray has painstakingly recreated Victorian London in all its anti-glory. It is the middle of the 19th century, and the increasing ranks of the poor and destitute are fighting to stay alive and out of the workhouse. Women forced to sell themselves in the grubby side-streets have one more foe to deal with—a serial killer who strangles his victims with a fine white scarf.
This fiend, going by the moniker of Chokee Bill, is soon apprehended, and yet the stranglings continue. Is there a copy-cat killer out there or is the condemned man innocent as he claims? And since the dead are only prostitutes who have no one to champion them, and the police are prepared to look the other way, who’s going to find out if the real killer is still at large?
Newspaper correspondent Edmund Whitty lives for his next pay-cheque, or rather, would not live if he were unable to fund his many, many, dissolute habits. Ever since his weasel died from an infected rat-bite, he has been avoiding his creditors. His laudanum must be paid for, as well as his lesser vices of tobacco and alcohol. Were it not for his brilliance at writing crisp copy for The Falcon, a talent second only to his ability to nose out a good story, Whitty, despite his Oxford education, would be just another perishing corpse on the filthy streets of London.
Despite being in a drug-induced haze off and on during the story, Whitty retains throughout an admirable tenacity and courage for a reporter often beaten to within an inch of his life, in his attempt to get to the truth. He gets no help at all from the Peelers and the rest of the Constabulary, and certainly not from Under-Inspector Salmon whose truncheon gets intimate with Whitty on more than one occasion.
When Whitty encounters the balladeer Owler (who takes him into the core of London’s meanest streets—the skilfully-depicted ‘Holy Land’), the two come to an understanding of sorts—each for his own purpose. The relationship that develops between Whitty and Owler, and the interaction of Whitty and his peers, not to mention that between Whitty and his publican Mrs Plant, serve to flesh out our protagonist, so much so that we start to fear for his well-being and wonder if he could sustain any more damage without irrevocable harm. His characterization is so layered and so well-rendered, and it is a pleasure to read his every utterance.
The author has a sure hand with dialogue. The characters are revealed through their words as much as through their deeds, and while there is exposition, this is not on the whole intrusive. The sights and sounds and, indeed, the smells, of Victorian London are evoked with a masterly hand. There may be a surfeit of details for some, and the length of sentences does slow the pace down a tad, but the style is in keeping with novels of the Victorian era, and I find it hard to complain. After all, much of the pleasure of reading this novel is derived from its style and when such is so obviously backed by exhaustive research, it is hard not to get drawn in.
You can see the destitute huddling in the doorways while the toffs pass by unseeing. You can hear the carriages clacking on the cobblestones. You almost retch at the odours rising like a miasma from the filth and squalor. And through it all, the fiend stalks the back-streets of London, perhaps daintily avoiding the puddles of slime and grime, white scarf twisting in both hands as he approaches a young girl from behind. How can one not root for Whitty and Owler to get to him before another ‘fallen’ woman falls prey to the Human in Fiend form?
Highly evocative, immaculately researched, beautifully written, and with a delightfully wry sense of humour to boot, this novel is highly recommended, especially for lovers of period fiction, thrillers, and crime novels.
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