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Historical Crime Fiction

A WASP IN THE BEEHIVE . . . Between the covers

The Brigid Reardon Mysteries by Mary Logue are historical mysteries centered on an Irish immigrant navigating the American West in the 1880s. Starting with The Streel (2020) and followed by The Big Sugar (2023), the series features a determined, independent protagonist who solves murders in places like Deadwood and Cheyenne while seeking a better life. This is the third in the series, and begins in Salt Lake City where the eighteen year-old Brigid is applying for a job in a bookstore owned by a Mr Cutter.

We know from a brief preface that this gentleman has five wives, but this is, after all, Mormon central. Mr Cutter is something of a nasty piece of work. Not content with his five wives, he has his eyes on a sixth, Amelia. Normal terms for relatives become a problem in pluralistic marriages, but I think Amelia is his step daughter, as she is the daughter (by a previous marriage) of his second wife, Sarah. Unfortunately for Cutter’s equilibrium, sixteen year-old Amelia has fallen in love with Brandon, Cutter’s son by his first wife, Eliza.

When Mr Cutter is found dead in the sewing room of their house – a room he never has reason to visit – Brigid is reacquainted with Dr Kohler, a man she met in the bookstore. Doctor K has little to do with live patients – he is the city coroner. Cutter’s demise ushers in a delightful (for us readers) whodunnit, as a longish list of suspects is instantly available. Was it one of the wives, driven by jealousy? Brandon – or even Amelia – angered by his refusal to countenance their affection for each other? Or is it someone outside the family with a grudge against Cutter due to some slight or grievance borne out of the complex local religious politics? Whoever, the relationship between Kohler and Brigid is a CriFi match made in heaven.

At 200 pages, this is more of a novella, but none the worse for that. Spoiler alert – we are introduced to the murder weapon early in the piece, but as to who wielded it, that is rather more nuanced. There is one trivial, but unfortunate, research error. Dr Kohler refers to the methods of Sherlock Holmes. This is 1881, and it would be another six years before the character would appear, in A Study In Scarlet.

Written in the first person, the narrative of A Wasp In The Beehive ensures that we know plenty about Brigid. She is a bright, resourceful and courageous heroine. Categories are subjective, I suppose, but they are useful for tags, so I class this as Cosy Crime. Not my chosen genre, for sure, but I enjoyed this tale. It is published by The University of Minnesota Press and is available now.

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THE FACES OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Can crime novels teach you anything about a location? Fans of the late Phil Rickman would argue that they knew the Hereford/Wales borderlands through his Merrily Watkins novels. Readers of Jim Kelly’s Phillip Dryden books might , as a consequence, claim a nodding acquaintance with the Fens. London? Perhaps too vast and unknowable despite the best efforts of Mark Billingham and Tony Parsons. Leeds? I knew it through countless visits to an undergraduate son, but always found the place rather intimidating. Chris Nickson lives there, and has used it as the background for three series of novels. In those featuring Simon Westow we are in Georgian times. The baton is then handed on to Tom Harper, who bestrides the city like a colossus from Victoria’s reign to the period after The Great War.

Now we are in WW2, with a redoubtable young woman, Cathy Marsden, who has been seconded from the local police force to the Special Investigation Branch, an embryonic group whose work sits in the gap between regular policing and military intelligence. We are in the spring of 1944. Cathy is newly engaged to Tom, a mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He has served in North Africa, where he has managed to keep himself out of the firing line. Now, after a spell of leave, he has been recalled.

There are rumours that the Allies are building up to ‘something big’. At work, Cathy and her colleagues are investigating a fatal car crash in which a local spiv and his girlfriend were killed. More intriguing is the fact that the boot of the car was filled with handguns stolen from American and British barrack armouries.When another small time local crook, Ricky Hopper, ends up being mangled in the metal waterwheel of a local factory, Cathy realises that these are deep waters, as dark and dangerous as the River Aire itself.

Nickson effortlessly captures the privations of ordinary Britains during the war.
“Cathy settled with her fish paste sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and thermos flask of tomato soup. Her mother made the same thing each week. One more routine of war, she’d be happy to leave behind.”

The author makes other very apposite cultural references. Safe in her own bed, in her own home, Cathy reads herself to sleep with Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill, a romantic saga about an Irish family, published just a year earlier.

Vernon Scannell wrote:
“Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:”
That terrible conflict hangs heavy over the Marsden household. Gassed while ‘doing his bit’, Cathy’s father’s lungs were ruined, and every breath is a struggle. There is a terrible irony that just three decades later, the same mortal enemies are intent on ripping out each others’ hearts.The SIB search narrows in focus. They are looking for two men. Dandy Wilson is the new Mr Big in the Leeds underworld of touts and black marketeers, while Corporal Lyle Brevitt is the source of the pilfered American stores. Anxious to find the latter is US military policeman Frank Graves.The SIB receive reliable information about where to find Wilson, but when they raid the property, their quarry is gone. Given the timescale, the inescapable conclusion is that someone is passing on inside information to the fugitive. Does the leak come from the regular police or – unthinkably – from someone in SIB?

Eventually, both Wilson and Brevitt are tracked down and the traitor within is unmasked. What Nickson – like all good novelists – does well is to make us care deeply about the central characters. Here, we leave Leeds on the eve of ‘D’ Day, and we can only hope that Cathy’s Tom survives what is to come, and returns to claim his bride. The Faces of The Dead was published by Severn House on 7th April.

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A LION’S RANSOM . . . Between the covers

I recently reviewed The Meadows of Murder by Paul Doherty, set in 14th century London, during the eventful reign of Richard II. Here, we are in York, but slightly earlier. Richard, still not a teenager, is just months into his kingship, and the Goldsmiths of York have, at their own expense, fashioned a miniature golden lion, which is to be presented to the young monarch as a token of allegiance. When the immensely valuable artifact is stolen on the eve of its being carried to London, former Captain of Archers and spymaster for the Archbishop of York, Owen Archer, is called to investigate.

Archer’s wife Lucie is an apothecary and herbalist, and while she and the children are out gathering herbs, they find a corpse in the river. He is naked, and the local fauna have taken his eyes. But who is he, and is he connected with the theft? Following enquiries it seems that the dead man has been noticed in the city over the previous few weeks, but only gave his name as Walter. Central to the search for the stolen lion is another man at arms, Martin Wirthir. The Flemish former soldier and mercenary lives with the Archer family, and is a veteran of many campaigns. He is, however weakened by ill health and injury and, like Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Walter’s clothes are eventually discovered. Cunningly sewn into their seams are documents that reveal he was Walter Bolton, a spy working for Sir John Neville, Baron of Raby, a powerful soldier and politician, but a man currently out of favour with John of Gaunt. The next corpse to be found is that of Costen van Peelt, another Fleming, and a man suspecting of using his talent – he was a gifted artist – to spy on merchants and politicians across the city. He did not die easily. Archer suspects the brutal torture that preceded his death was an attempt to force him to reveal his many secrets, and the men who were employing to gather them.

Embedded in the heart of this novel is York’s Guild of Goldsmiths. We have nothing today which exactly replicates the Guild system. Guilds were groups of craftsmen and merchants who grouped together for – in theory – mutual protection and benefit. They often wielded more local power than the church and royal functionaries such as Sheriffs and Castellans. Here, discontent rumbles within the ranks of the city’s Goldsmiths. Petty jealousies and professional rivalries can be destructive, but can they lead to murder?

Archer learns that Walter Bolton was not only working for Sir John Neville, but was his illegitimate son. Bastard though he was, Bolton was of Neville’s blood, and the Baron wants answers.

On a geographical note, we would do well to remember the vital part the River Ouse played in York’s history. Now mostly a tourist feature (but still a potent flood risk) the Ouse linked York, via the Humber, to international trade and in this case, the risk of piracy.

Historical crime fiction that is set in eras prior to the mid 19thC is a strange beast, in some ways. The authors – and they are many, and often distinguished – clothe their investigators with a mantle that we know can only have existed in modern times, such as the obvious trappings of interviewing suspects, crime scene investigation, identity parades, the search for motives and the presence or absence of alibis. Did investigators in the 14thC operate like this? We have no evidence to suggest that they did, but it matters not. A Lion’s Ransom is a cracking read and totally engaging. It was published by Severn House on 6th January.

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THE MEADOWS OF MURDER . . . Between the covers

I confess to being a devoted fan of medieval mysteries. I think it started with The White Company. Though clearly not a crime novel, that book triggered my interest in the period and it’s people. Since then, we have had Ellis Peters, Umberto Eco and Sarah Hawksworth, to name but three. I am new to Paul Doherty’s Brother Athelstan books, but was not disappointed by The Meadows of Murder. We are in late 14th century London, Athelstan is priest of St Erconwald’s church, and on the north bank of the Thames, the bodies of those executed for their role in the recently crushed Peasant’s Revolt are hanging rotting from their gibbets. The prologue explains the complex political situation of the day: the King, Richard II, is little more than a boy; John of Gaunt is locked in conflict with the powerful guildsmen of London, while powerful figures like Richard’s mother Joan, conspire behind the scenes. The country is still struggling from devastating effects of The Black Death.

This is no softly tinted golden account of a fondly imagined medieval England. It is full of dark corners and harsh realities. Members of a London Guild who were guilty of what is best described as a group rape of a Spanish entertainer are being murdered, one by one. A terminally Ill craftsman has sought sanctuary in Athelstan’s church for murdering a Jewish moneylender. London’s streets are dangerous places, violent and foul with sewage. Somehow, Athelstan rides the storm, helped by a mixture of his own resolute faith and the strength of his personality.

Athelstan and his friend Sir John Cranston, the Lord Hugh Coroner of London, are drawn to St Osyth’s Priory on the north bank of the Thames. It was there, that Massimo Servini, the abused Spaniard, was taken to die. The Priory has its own mysteries. Why the previous Abbess and Prioress disappear, one with a quantity of stolen treasure? Why is Thibault, the Queen Mother’s confidante ever present? And is Adam the Anchorite actually the brain damaged fool he appears to be, or is his imbecility a cloak masking something far more sinister?

There are touches of wry humour. Athelstan’s parishioners are certainly a peculiar bunch. He has summoned them to the church.

“He glared and he stared, managing his anger, but also counting heads and remembering faces. Watkin, the Dung collector, his nephew, Michael the Minstrel, Pike the Ditcher, Ranulph, the Rat Ctcher, with his two caged ferrets, Ferox and Audax, the Hangman of Rochester, Crispin, the Carpenter, Jocelyn, the Tavern Master, and all the rest of the motley crew.”

Looming over the narrative is the immense figure of John of Gaunt. The third son of Edward III, denied the crown by primogeniture, he was still an immense political figure. Best remembered today for the memorable speech Shakespeare put into his mouth in Richard II, he nevertheless was – briefly, and by marriage – king of the ancient Spanish kingdom of Castile. His son was crowned Henry IV in 1399. The animosity between him and the London Guilds is a key part of this tale. His name? He was born in the Flemish city of Ghent, now Gand. Paul Doherty (via the perception and acuity of Athelstan) raises the concept of what were called ‘by-blow’ progeny, – children not legitimised by marriage. Men like John of Gaunt could have numerous bastard offspring, and it was seen as nothing more than a testament to their virility, but for women of noble birth it was another matter altogether.

The key to the mystery lies at St Osyth’s, both above and beneath the ground. Athelstan uncovers a fatal network of allegiances and grievances that has caused many deaths. The humble priest’s ability to move effortlessly between Court, Cloister and Commons is rather implausible, but Paul Doherty has given us a compulsive read, full of larger-than-life characters, set against an impeccably researched portrait of mid-14thC London. The Meadows of Murder will be published by Severn House on 6th January.

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MURDER IN PARIS . . . Between the covers

It is April 1945, and we are in Paris. The fighting has long since moved east, but the consequences of the previous four years are very evident. Charles de Gaulle has marched at the head of his victory parade, convincing some (but not all) that he had liberated France entirely on his own. Across the country, collaborators are being executed, and the women who consorted too freely with Germans are being roughly dealt with. In the gaol at Fresnes are several women who have been liberated from Ravensbruck. They all claim to be victims of the Nazis, but are some of them not who they say they are?

Frederick Rowlands has been brought to Paris by Iris Barnes, an MI6 officer, to confirm – or refute – the identity of a woman he once knew in the days before he lost his sight. He meets Clara Metzner. She is skin and bone, after her incarceration in Ravensbruck, and he is uncertain. The next day, she is found dead in her cell, apparently haven taken her own life.

Fictional detectives seem to be perfectly able to do their jobs despite various physical and mental conditions which might be regarded as disabilities. Nero Wolfe was too obese to leave his apartment, Lincoln Rhyme is quadriplegic, Fiona Griffiths has Cotard’s syndrome, while George Cross is autistic. Christina Koning’s Frederick Rowlands isn’t the first blind detective, of course, as Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados stories entranced readers over a century ago.

The febrile atmosphere and often uneasy ‘peace’ in Paris is vividly described, and we even have some thinly disguised real life characters with walk-on parts, such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Pablo Picasso, Edith Piaf, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis.

As Rowlands and Barnes seem to be clutching at straws as they try to identify the girl who was murdered – a shock induced heart failure, according to the autopsy – the plot spins off at a tangent. Lady Celia, a member of the Irish aristocracy, asks Rowlands to trace a young man, Sebastian Gogarty, a former employee, who was last heard of as a POW in Silesia. He agrees, and as he and Major Cochrane, one of Lady Celia’s admirers head off on their search, they drive through a very different France. Paris, largely untouched by street fighting or bombs, is in stark contrast to the countryside further east, devastated by the retreating Germans. Gogarty has been living with a group of Maquis, but he returns to Paris after telling Rowlands and Cochrane about the execution of four female resistance members in his camp.

There is an interlude, tenderly described when, after failing to resolve issues in France, Rowlands returns to England. During the elation of VE Day, he recalls a more sombre occasion.

“He remembered standing in a crowd in Trafalgar Square as large as this one. It had been on Armistice Day, 1919. That had been a silent crowd, all the more impressive because of its silence. There had been no cheers, no flag waving as there was now. When the maroon sounded, the transformation was immediate. The roar of traffic died. All the men removed their hats. Men and women stood with heads bowed, unmoving. For fully two minutes the silence was maintained then and across the country. Everyone and everything stopped. Buses, trains, trams, and horse-drawn vehicles halted. Factories ceased working, as did offices, shops, hospitals and banks. Schools became silent. Court proceedings came to a standstill. Prisoners stood to attention in their cells. Only the sound of a muffled bell tolling the hour of eleven broke the silence.”

Rowlands and his family reconcile themselves to leaving their temporary home in Brighton for their bomb damaged home in London, but there is much work to be done. When not involved in investigations, Rowlands has worked with St Dunstan’s, the charity set up to employ blind veterans. Now, with tens of thousands of able-bodied military people being demobbed, will there still be work for them?

The action reverts to Paris, wth Rowlands returning, accompanied by young Jewish man, Clara Meltzner’s brother. It becomes increasingly obvious that some organisation is determined to prevent the true identity of the young woman murdered in Fresnes gaol being revealed. Rowland’s problem is that, despite the Germans no longer being physically present, everyone is at each other’s throats – the rival Résistance groups, Gaullists, communists, Nazi sympathisers – each has much to lose, and violence has become a way of life.

Christina Koning’s spirited account of a Paris springtime takes in so many evocative locations – Le cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the sinister depths of the Catacombs, the newly bustling shops fragrant with fresh baked bread and ripe fromage – that we are transported into another world. Murder in Paris will be published by Allison & Busby on 20th November.

 

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A RAGE OF SOULS . . . Between the covers

This begins as one of the most baffling and impenetrable of Simon Westow’s cases. We are in Leeds, 1826. He solves a case of fraud, the fraudster is sentence to hang, but reprieved. He then returns with his wife to shadow the man he originally tried to defraud. The man, who calls himself Fox, seems connected to his victim, a Mr Barton, via Barton’s wayward son, Andrew. Westow, like Ulysses in Tennyson’s great poem, no longer has “that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven,” due to a serious wound sustained in a previous case, but his eyes, ears – and legs on the street are provided by his lethal young assistants Jane and Sally.

One of Nickson’s many skills as a writer is to point out the dramatic contrast between the industrial stink of Leeds and the uncorrupted countryside not many miles outside the city. Andrew Barton goes missing, so Jane and the boy’s anxious father make the journey in a chaise towards Tadcaster. Jane investigates the ancient church of St Mary, Lead, solitary and empty in a lonely field. Near the church runs the Cock Beck, which was reported to have run red with blood during the nearby Battle of Towton in 1461, and as she crosses the stream , she makes a terrible discovery.

Quietly, Nickson references the timeless joy of reading. Jane, once an illiterate street urchin, has been taught to read by Mrs Shields, the old lady who has become the mother she never had. Now, Jane spends her spare hours immersed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, borrowed from the circulating library. The printed words take Jane away from the perils and drudgery of her own existence to a world of daring, adventure and hope. In his own way. Nickson does precisely the same thing.

There is a deep sense of poetry in the book, not just in the words, but in the juxtaposition of images. The book begins with Jane witnessing the result of a horrifying industrial accident.  A young girl is being roughly carried to the surgeon, her leg mangled beyond repair. This haunts Jane throughout the book, but then, near the end, there is a kind of redemption. One of the regular characters who ekes out a living on Westow’s streets is Davy, the blind fiddler. Jane’s trauma is redeemed:

“Up by the market cross, Davy Cassidy was playing a sprightly tune that ended as she drew close. He gazed around with his sightless eyes and a girl appeared whispering a word into his ear. He lifted his bow and began to play again, low, mournful. Then the girl stepped forward and began to sing. Jane knew her face. She’d lived with it for months. She’d seen it contorted with pain as the girl was carried from the mill, her leg in shreds. Then when it returned night after night in her dreams. Now she was here, one-legged, supported by a crutch, a voice as unearthly sweet as a visitation as she sang about a girl who moved through the fair. She stood transfixed as a disbelief fragmented and disappeared. The pain she’d heard in the girl that day in February had become beauty. The small crowd was silent, caught in the words, the singing while the world receded around them. The last note ended, a stunned silence, then applause and people pushing forward to put coins into the hat on the ground.”

Eventually, by a mixture of judgment perseverance and good fortune, the mysterious Fox is run to ground in a bloodthirsty finale. A Rage of Souls is Chris Nickson at his best – complex, compelling and, above all. compassionate. It will be published by Severn House on 7th October. You can take a look at earlier Simon Westow books here.

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THE DEVIL’S SMILE . . . Between the covers

This is the sequel to The Lollipop Man (read my review from earlier this year) and we are reunited with reluctant student investigator Adrian Brown, and his friend Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and co-presenter of Yorkshire Crimetime, a regional TV show featuring local criminal activity.. Adrian’s social life is not exactly glittering, and consists largely of optimistic – but largely disappointing – trips to gay pubs and clubs in mid 1990s Leeds. A recent Yorkshire Crimetime featured the murder of a young gay man, a waiter at a local Italian bistro.

Thanks to a timely intervention by his housemate, Adrian has survived the consequences of one drunken pick-up too many, in the shape of an encounter with a predator called Edmund. Meanwhile, Sheila’s  co-presenter Tony Tranter has gone missing. He is a narcissistic drunk, and has a reputation for unreliability, but this time his absence seems more serious. Then, Tranter’s car is found abandoned under Leeds railway station, bearing signs of a violent struggle. Not long after, his body is found nearby, concealed beside one of the vast Dark Arches above which is the station, and below which the captive River Aire roars and foams. Sheila, fed information by her journalist friend Jeanette Dinsdale, know knows that a scandal was about to break. Tranter was a member of an exclusive and secretive club, where underage girls and boys were provided to provide ‘entertainment’.

The initial, and benevolent, reaction of the TV people is that Tony Tranter was killed in revenge for some criminal who had been brought down as a result of Yorkshire Crimetime’s actions. Sheila suspects differently, but goes along with the initial impetus to record a TV special which will enlist the help of tens of thousands of viewers to bring Tranter’s killer to justice. Adrian, meanwhile, has finally reported his assault to the largely uninterested West Yorkshire Police, concerned

I have tagged this novel as #historicalcrimefiction, but it just doesn’t seem that long ago. I was never an addicted viewer, but Crimewatch was, for a few years a major BBC show. Main presenter, the earnest and clean-cut Nick Ross, with his ‘glamorous assistant’ Sue Cook, purported to solve crimes by presenting re-enactions of crime scenes, and inviting viewers to telephone in with information. It seems bizarre that it lasted as long as it did, and is haunted by the supreme irony that the murder of one of its later presenters, Suzanne Dando, remains one of the great unsolved crimes in British history. Sheila Hargreaves’s show is something similar, and has a huge audience.

It is worth taking a moment to look at Leeds as a crime novel setting. In terms of output, the stories of Chris Nickson take some beating, and he has set his novels in different historical periods, my favourites being the Tom Harper books which follow the Leeds copper from the late Victorian era through to the end of The Great War. In terms of grim and grimy readabiity, the GrandDaddy has to be David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, set from 1974 to 1983, which pretty much encompassed the era of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. My review of two of those books is here.

Back to this novel. Daniel Sellers has Sheila, Adrian, the police (and us) following a series of imaginatively crafted red herrings, until a thrilling finale reveals the truth. This enterprising and addictive thriller will be published by Allison & Busby on 21st August.

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POWDER SMOKE . . . Between the covers

I absolutely adored Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer novels from the word go. The Necropolis Railway was set around the actual railway line near Waterloo that took hearse carriages containing the coffins that would be buried in the relatively new Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, and introduced Jim Stringer, a young railwayman who would join the Railway police, and solve many mysteries, including novels set during Jim’s wartime experience on The Somme, Mesopotamia, and post-war India.

Now, we are in 1925, and Jim is a Detective Inspector based in York. The story is based on a strange encounter Jim had at the York Summer Gala in the summer of that year. He meets his boss, who insists they go and watch one of the attractions – a Wild West Show. They see the usual antics – a fake Red Indian, a ‘gunslinger’ who throws knives at his provocatively dressed female partner, then shoots clay pipes out of her mouth. Both the woman, the Red Indian and the cowboy are about as American as Yorkshire Pudding, but in the audience is a genuine American (who acts as a stooge for the performers, and a celebrated couple in the entertainment business, celebrated film star Cynthia Lorne  and her producer husband, Tom Brooks.

The gunslinger, Jack ‘ Kid’ Durrant, is not only good with guns, but has ambitions to writer cowboy novels, rather after the celebrated author of Riders of The Purple Sage, Zane Grey (1872 – 1939) Not only that, the relationship between Lorne, Brooks and himself is, as they say, interesting. When Lorne is found dead, with Brooks and Durrant both missing, it is assumed that Durrant is the killer. Although it is not strictly a matter for the Railway Police, Jim feels personally involved, and visits the place where the three were last seen – the grounds of Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale. This allows Andrew Martin (left) to introduce us to what is known as one of the most dangerous rivers in Europe, The Strid. This natural phenomenon sees the River Wharfe forced through a narrow ravine, just a few feet wide. It has been described as the river ‘running sideways’, rather like a twisted ribbon and is believed to be prodigiously deep. No-one goes into it and ever comes out alive.

The best series are enlivened by recurring subsidiary characters, and one has been ever present in the Jim Stringer novels, in the shape of his wife Lydia. We met her when she was young Jim’s landlady in the first novel. Although understandably distant when Jim was on military duties in France, Mesopotamia and India, she has remained by his side. I am not sure how Martin does it but, without being in the least explicit, he makes her quite the most alluring copper’s wife in detective fiction, and their courtship in The Necropolis Railway was – and you’ll have to read the book to understand the contradiction – chastely erotic.

Central to the appeal is, of course, the heartbreaking descriptions of a railway that we once had, but threw away in various acts of criminal negligence and wrong-headedness. The magnificent smoke and almost animal fury of the engines, the cathedrals that were the stations, the legions of uniformed officials, and the fact that in 1925 you could take a train from almost anywhere to somewhere else with minimal discomfort. All now gone and, in the words of the hymn;

“They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”

Jim, of course, tries to get to the bottom of of the mystery, party because – in spite of his devotion to Lydia – he was slightly smitten by the deceased movie star. The melancholy denouement involves a London and North Eastern Railway locomotive,and a definite sense of closure – if not satisfaction – for our man. In one sense, none of this matters, as our total engagement with the pubs, hotels, railway world, social quirks of the 1920s, and the lingering legacy of The Great War has given us that comfortable sensation we feel after feeling sated after a delicious meal. Powder Smoke is published by Corsair and is available now.

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THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE . . . Between the covers

Thomas True is the son of the Rector of Highgate. Now a sought after London suburb, in the early 18th century, at the time in which this novel is set, it was a country village. The young man has, for some years, been aware of his homosexuality and, unfortunately, so has his fire and brimstone father, who has done his best to beat out of his son what he sees as ‘the Devil’. Thomas has saved up his allowance and is determined to escape the misery.

Unknown to his parents, Thomas has been writing to his cousin Amelia in London, with a view to living with her and her parents. Within minutes of jumping down from the mail coach into the mire of a London street, he has been drawn into a world that is both breathlessly exciting and profoundly dangerous. The world of the molly houses in London was already well established, and would continue as a forbidden attraction well beyond the scandal of the Cleveland Street raid in 1889 in which Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor was implicated, although there has never been any conclusive evidence that he was a customer of this male brothel. A molly? There is a lengthy explanation here.

Thomas meets a young man called Jack Huffins who is quick to recognise the lad as a kindred spirit, and he introduces him to Mother Clap’s which is, I suppose, the eighteenth century equivalent of a gay nightclub. We also meet a significant figure in the story, a burly stonemason called Gabriel Griffin. Working on the recently completed St Paul’s cathedral is his day job, but by night he is the bouncer at Mother Clap”s. He is also a man in perpetual mourning, haunted by his wife and child who died together three years earlier.

Hovering in the background to the revelry at Mother Clap’s is The Society for the Reformation of Manners. They actually existed, as did Mother Clap’s. The Society was, collectively, a kind of Mary Whitehouse (remember her?) of the day, and they existed to root out what they saw as moral decay, particularly of a sexual nature. They were far more sinister than the Warwickshire-born Christian campaigner however, as back then, men convicted of sodomy, buggery and ‘unnatural behaviour’ could be – and often were – hanged. The Society has inserted ‘ a rat’ into  Mother Clap’s community. Quite simply, he is paid by his masters to identify participants, and give their names to two particularly repugnant officers of The Society, Justice Grimp and Justice Myre (Grimpen Mire, anyone?) The main  plot centres on the search for the identity of ‘the rat’.

At times, the picture that AJ West (his website is here) paints of London is as foetid, grotesque and full of nightmarish creatures as that seen when zooming in to a detail in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic paintings. West’s London is largely based on history, but there are moments, such as when Thomas and Gabriel are captured by a tribe of street urchins in their dazzlingly strange lair, that the reader slips off the real world and drifts somewhere else altogether.

What the author does well is to show up the anguish and insecurity of the men who feel compelled to posture and pose as mollies, in an attempt to nullify the boredom of their respectable family lives. The bond of love that develops between Thomas and Gabriel is genuine, and certainly more powerful than the silly nicknames and grotesque flouncing at Mother Clap’s. The book ends with heartbreak. Or does it? Given that Gabriel is susceptible to ghosts, he is perhaps not a reliable narrator, and AJ West’s last few paragraphs suggest that the Society has, like the President of the Immortals at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ended its sport with Thomas and Gabriel. This paperback edition is out today, 3rd July, from Orenda Books.

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