A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s.  We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities.  And written, moreover, with wit.

Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology.  He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research.  The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it.  But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.

It's all great fun.  The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are.  After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond.  I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

The Dorrington Deed-Box - Arthur Morrison

 Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) was a very successful chronicler of London low-life.  His masterpiece was probably A Child of the Jago, a wonderful book.  In the 1970s he was rediscovered thanks to Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.  This, from 1897, is one of the many variants Morrison conjured up in 'rivalry' of Conan Doyle.

Horace Dorrington, of Dorrington and Hicks, in Bedford Street, Covent Garden.  Dorrington is an inquiry agent in the same way that Holmes was a consulting detective.  He is also, in the tradition of Jonathan Wild, a conman and a crook.  Morrison has devised an ingenious way of disguising the fact that these were doubtless originally published as separate short stories in various periodicals.  He begins with 'The Narrative of Mr James Rigby' in which a young Australian discovers the duplicity of Dorrington after escaping a fiendish death trap.  He also discovers the titular deed box from which he reconstructs other crimes and cases, the first of which, 'The Case of Janisssary,' tells how Dorrington came into possession of the death trap and the couple who operate it.

For fans of the genre the collection is many-layered.  James Rigby is almost certainly Australian in homage to Guy Boothby (1867-1905), an Australian come to London, who created Doctor Nikola, a super-criminal who in his day rivalled and even outstripped Holmes's arch-enemy Moriarty.  In 'The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon the victim is an avid collector of oriental art, as was Morrison.

Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

The Way of All Flesh - Ambrose Parry

 'Ambrose Parry' is really Christopher Brookmyre and his wife Marisa Haeztman.  This is not a secret; they sign off the Historical Note in their actual names.  But the choice of a joint pseudonym in the manner of Nikki French is a wise one.  Anyone familiar with Brookmyre's solo work over the years would not expect a book like this, whereas Ambrose Parry sums it up exactly.

The story is set in Edinburgh and is absolutely noir, starting with a murdered prostitute (and, as Parry points out, 'No decent story ought to begin with a dead prostitute.") but it is set in 1847, when specialist obstetricians in Scotland are experimenting with anesthesia, and medical student Will Raven is taken on as apprentice to Professor James Young Simpson, the leading surgeon of the day.  Will Raven is also an assumed name and its bearer has unpleasant links with both the Edinburgh underworld and the murdered prostitute.  Also in the Simpson household is housemaid Sarah Fisher, who has ambitions beyond her station and is a friend of the enxt young woman to die suspiciously.

And so we're off on a classic murder mystery with drugs and cross-dressing and backstreet abortions thrown in.  It is all excellently well done, full of red herrings and subplots.  The characters all stand out vividly - I especially enjoyed the underworld enforcers Gargantua and the Weasel.  The historical background has been expertly researched and is served up simply and effectively.  Surely this will be the first in a series?  Surely someone will adapt it for TV?

His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet

His Bloody Project didn't win the 2016 Man Booker Prize (I can't recall what did) but it outsold all the other novels on the shortlist. It purports to be a dossier of documents found by Burnet when researching his Macrae ancestors. The documents relate to the murder of Lachlan Mackenzie of Culduie in Ross-shire in August 1869, for which seventeen year-old Roderick Macrae was hanged in Inverness in September.


The documents consist of a handful of witness statements gathered by local police, the account which Roddy wrote at his solicitor's request whilst awaiting trial, a report (wonderfully entitled Travels in the Border-Lands of Lunacy) by J Bruce Thomson, resident surgeon at Perth prison and leading criminal anthropologist, an account of the trial compiled from contemporary newspapers, and a short epilogue describing Roddy's wretched end.


It's all a fake - or is it? We can't fail to notice that Burnet is himself a Macrae. It is the actuality question which hooks us to begin with. After all, there can't be much of a whodunit here. There are only nine houses in the crofting hamlet and Roddy was seen heading to Mackenzie's with the murder weapons and again, coming back half-an-hour later smothered in fresh blood. More to the point, Roddy has insisted, from that moment forward, that he alone did it. Is he mad? This is the only hope of his solicitor, who commissions the report from Thomson. But there is no sign of madness in Roddy's writing. True, some of his neighbours consider him to be an imbecile, but his schoolmaster wanted to put him forward for a scholarship.


Burnet ingeniously plants a couple of clues that suggest all might not be as it seems. They come together at the end but - another masterstroke - we don't get Roddy's reaction to them because defendants were not at that time allowed to give evidence in court.


Alongside all this we get a fascinating insight into the life of a mid-Victorian Highland crofter, a life that seems unchanged for thousands of years and which, to those trapped in it, must have seemed like it would never changed - renting their land at the whim of the laird and his factor, their only refuge their grim church. One of the great elements here is Burnet's portrait of utter, hopeless despair in Roddy's father John, a man in his forties looking twice his age, armoured in misery.


A tremendous book by an author of prodigious promise. There is an earlier novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, which won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award in 2013, so I must get hold of that. And Burnet's next can't come soon enough for me.

Fanny & Stella, The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England - Neil McKenna

April 1870, Ernest and Fred, or maybe Stella and Fanny, are attracting the boys' attention at the rather dodgy Strand Theatre.  Stella nips to the ladies.  They leave - and are promptly lifted by the police for the horrid crime of dressing as women.

Only ... crossdressing isn't a crime.  So the police have to build a case for buggery, which is, in Victorian times, very much a crime with penalties ranging up to long prison sentences with hard labour, which are to all intents and purposes death sentences because very few survive.  The next problem is, how do you prove giving or receiving anal intercourse?  The greatest medical brains of London are brought to bear.  Ernest and Fred are examined in minute, excruciating detail.  And, inevitably - to coin a phrase - they can't prove bugger all.

So, given the press hysteria (and the fact that Stella is apparently married to an MP who also happens to be the son and brother of dukes), the authorities end up with some ridiculous charge along the lines of outraging public decency.  In a West End theatre?  Then as now, come off it!

The fiasco drags on for a full year.  The showcase trial is held in Westminster Hall, the Lord Chief Justice presiding, the Attorney General leading for the prosecution.

Neil McKenna writes beautifully, sensitively.  The amount of research for this ostensible thin tale was clearly enormous.  Fascinating insight.  Great empathy.  A story brilliantly told.

The Invention of Murder - Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders has produced a huge book, incredibly well-researched, but the subtitle for me indicates its main flaw.  "How the Victorians revelled in Death and Destruction and created modern crime."  Yes, true enough but not peculiar to the Victorians.  The Elizabethans and the Georgians also revelled in true crime fact and fiction - consider Greene, Nashe, Fielding, and Defoe - and what really invented modern crime - that is to say, crime that is not entirely metropolitan - is mass transport, which admittedly came about during Victoria's reign although the steam train itself predates it.

Flanders, however, is a Victorian specialist and she knows her period in absolute detail.  Not all the murders considered here are either gruesome or even interesting - Flanders' point is that they all, for one reason or another, caught the public imagination and were reinvented, sanitised or elaborated on stage or in fiction.  She has made an exhaustive study of the yellow/gutter press, the 19th century equivalent of today's chip-paper/red-tops with their blithe disregard for truth.

For a thorough, single volume overview of British murder from the Red Barn to Jack the Ripper, The Invention of Murder would be hard to beat.  Individual murders or murderers have been explored better elsewhere.  What is absolutely invaluable for the murder buff, however, is the 40 page notes section.  I found many leads for stories that especially interest me - and, to be absolutely fair to Flanders - not all of them were Victorian.

The Blackest Streets - Sarah Wise

This is a deeply-researched, unflinching account of the Old Nichol slum in late Victorian Shoreditch.  It has been put together with academic precision but what makes it such a captivating read is that Wise is not shy about saying what she thinks of the slumlords and their elected representatives.  In the case of the Old Nichol they are largely one and the same.  Local government in London at that time was in the hands of the vestry, forerunner of today's parish councils.  Like the parish councils they were expensive, ineffective, self-serving and hypocritical.  The Nichol Vestrymen owned the very slums they pontificated about and when they were forcibly stood down after three years' service, joined the Board of Guardians in order to deny relief to their tenants until they were free to resume their vestry seats.

The ownership of the Nichol properties is Wise's best work here.  Other notable blots on the social landscape included the pointless third duke of Chandos, and Sir "Tommy" Colebrooke, so-called lord of the manor of Stepney, gawd 'elp us.  Vermin both.  She also offers an illuminating insight into Arthur Morrison's classic, A Child of the Jago, which is set in a thinly-disguised Nichol.

Sarah Wise is building an important career writing about the social injustices of the capital of the empire on which the sun never set.  Her first book, The Italian Boy, was about the horrors of the workhouse and her latest, Inconvenient People, concerns the Lunacy trade in Victorian London, a subject I have researched to a certain extent myself.  I can't wait to read her findings.

Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob - Francis Selwyn

I happened upon this series by accident but will purposefully seek out more.  Francis Selwyn is a pseudonym of Donald Thomas, poet, prolific author and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University.  His passion appears to be Victorian crime fiction, because as well as the Verity series he has written (as Thomas) the Inspector Swain series (The Ripper's Apprentice sounds right up my street) and currently produces pseudo-Sherlocks.  His latest, Death on a Pale Horse, is due out next month.  As Selwyn he wrote Hitler's Englishman: The Crime of Lord Haw-Haw (1987), which has long been part of my collection and is my go-to research book regarding William Joyce.  Also as Selwyn he produced a book on Neville Heath which I am now looking out for.

Meanwhile, back to Sergeant Verity.  Some might say it is redolent of Peter Lovesey's seminal Sergeant Cribb series, which certainly predate Verity.  I am a great admirer of Cribb, albeit not of Lovesey's later work.  But Selwyn is the more adventurous writer and I enjoyed this, the fifth of the series, for the off-the-wall undercurrent.  Villains with names like Old Mole, Stunning Joseph, and Sealskin Kite are always going to attract me, and I also enjoyed the fact that Verity - wholly unlike Cribb - isn't all that bright.  The chase on the Brighton Parliamentary I thought was superbly done, a complex scenario executed in a genuinely thrilling style.