July 4, 2024

We haven’t had a resounding cad in popular fiction since George MacDonald Fraser took Harry Flashman, a relatively minor character in a little-read Victorian school novel, and had him bestride the 19th century like a colossus, meeting (and cheating) pretty much everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Otto von Bismarck. Now, Clive Woolliscroft introduces Lieutenant William Dunbar, an impoverished younger son of a Scottish nobleman – and utter bounder*.

* Bounder (noun, archaic): a man who behaves badly or in a way that is not moral, especially in his relationships with women.

Unlike Flashman, Dunbar doesn’t lack physical courage, and he fights with his regiment against Bonnie Prince Charlie’s highlanders at Culloden, so this places the events of the novel somewhere in the years after 1746. Dunbar, however, has neither the skills nor the family fortune to lead the rich man’s life he so desperately craves, and so he is on the look-out for wealth by marriage. Can he find a suitable young woman, with a sizeable *tocher and generous annual allowance from her wealthy parents?

* Tocher (Scots, archaic): A dowry: a marriage settlement given to the groom by the bride or her family.

For the first 120 pages or so, we view events through the eyes of William Dunbar. Thereafter, the narrative switches between that of Mercy Grundy and Dunbar. Quite early in the book, Dunbar had secretly married a Scottish heiress, Ann Macclesfield, (for her money of course) and she had borne him a daughter. The financial part of his plan had collapsed, due to religious complications after the battle of Culloden, but Anne now refuses to dissolve the marriage, thus putting a major impediment in the way of Dunbar’s plans to marry Mercy, and get his hands on her family’s wealth.

Dunbar leaves the army, and begins to make something of a living in the world of finance, managing to build up cash reserves, thus lessening the necessity of marriage. He then sees a chance to become very rich indeed by buying a share in a ship engaged in what was known, euphemistically, as the African Trade. This worked in a brutally simple fashion. The ship leaves Britain loaded with manufactured goods which could range from bolts of cloth to firearms and anything in between. These were then bartered for human cargo – slaves – on the coast of West Africa, which were then taken and sold in the slave markets of the Americas. In theory, the ship would then return to Britain, laden with cash.

Unfortunately for him, Dunbar’s ship, The Archer, is destroyed by fire after a mutiny of the slaves and he is, once again, left with nothing. He decides to try his luck once more with Mercy Grundy, but finding her father totally in opposition to his plans, he dupes Mercy into a course of action which will end disastrously for her. This mirrors the real life tragedy the book is based on – the case of Mary Blandy who, in 1752, was put on trial for poisoning her father.

The author served as an Army Officer in Germany, worked as an international money market trader in London, was a Management Consultant in Prague and Riga and practised as a solicitor in London, Hertfordshire, and Staffordshire. This is his second novel. ‘Less Dreadful With Every Step’ was published in May 2023.

Clive Woolliscroft’s attention to period detail is immaculate, and the mid-eighteenth century England of the wealthy middle class is beautifully recreated. William Dunbar is an out and out villain, with none of the dubious charm possessed by Harry Flashman. The book’s title is extremely apposite for poor Mercy Grundy. One False Step is published by The Book Guild, and is available now.

The search for the killer of a child long dead is a recurring trope in crime fiction, and it carries with it all manner of similar plot strands. There will be dusty police files, parents – probably elderly by now – and still clinging to the faint hope that there might be answers; almost certainly we will meet police officers who made mistakes, made the wrong call, or took crucial short-cuts; there will be intriguing glimpses into what life was like twenty, thirty years earlier, and a sense of the truth being buried under too many lies, too many errors, too little police time, and – perhaps – a victim who was not attractive enough to the media.

We get all this – and more – from Robert Bryndza’s The Lost Victim. Three decades earlier, before King’s Cross in London was a dazzling hub of boutique restaurants, state-of-the-art apartments and conference venues, a teenage girl named Janey Macklin was sent by her mum to buy a packet of fags from a newsagent’s shop, which sat among the grim streets, derelict warehouses, dark railway arches, smoke-filled pubs and knocking shops that made up London N1C 4AX in 1988. Janey never returned to the pub with her mum’s cigarettes. Her body was never found, despite traces of her blood being recorded in and around the places where she was last seen.

On the balance of probability, Robert Driscoll was convicted of her murder, but after a decade in jail, his case was reviewed and with a much smarter barrister than he was given at his first trial, Driscoll was released. Contemporary with Janey’s disappearance, a series of girls were being abducted and savaged by a man the press dubbed ‘ The Nine Elms Cannibal’. This time , there was no miscarriage of justice, and Peter Conway was caught, tried and convicted. He was a police officer, and married to Kate Marshall. Kate, also a copper, survived a bout of alcoholism brought about by the trauma, left the force, but has now reinvented herself as a private investigator, partnered by Tristan Harper, and based in Devon.

When she is contacted by a media agency who say they are preparing a True Crime series based on Janet’s disappearance, and need her to provide material, she reluctantly agrees. Since the case overlaps the story of her murderous husband, she senses that she might be about to be exploited, but it is the middle of winter, and her case load is not so heavy that she can afford to refuse.It does not take long for Kate Marshall to realise that she is being played by these media spivs. Not only that, a man in a relationship with one the agency’s employees was, almost certainly, a person of interest in the original investigation into Janey Macklin’s disappearance.

With awful scenes from her own past flitting in and out of her mind, Kate digs deeper and deeper into what happened on that chilly December evening, all those years ago. She is working for nothing, and running on fumes. Robert Bryndza doesn’t spare us from the numbing sense of loss felt by the people who knew and loved Janey, and when her remains are eventually found, we are left with an almost tangible sense of loss. We know her as a person; the girl who liked a bag of chips on a Friday night; the girl who went to ballet classes, perhaps dreaming of a future that could never have been realised.

I first encountered Kate Marshall in Nine Elms, which goes some way to putting her life into perspective. Click this link to read my review of that novel. In The Lost Victim we come face to face with truly vile human beings, thankfully behind bars for desecrating the lives of young people. Kate Marshall is a spirited and determined woman – a flawed, but believable heroine. The Lost Victim is published by Raven Street Publishing, and will be available on 11th July.