Do you enjoy some mystery in your historical fiction? Check out this book list...
1) "The Last Dickens" by Matthew Pearl
A rousing yarn of opium, book pirating, murder most foul, man-on-man biting and other shenanigans—and that’s just for starters.
Charles Dickens is dead, and, inexplicably, people are beginning to die because of that fact—not because they’ve got no reason to live absent new tales from a beloved author, but because said author’s last work-in-progress contains evidence of real-life mayhem that its perpetrators, it would seem, do not wish to see publicized. So runs the premise that Pearl (The Poe Shadow, 2006, etc.), who specializes in literary mysteries, offers. The story unfolds on the docks of Boston, to which an office boy has run to retrieve the next installment of Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood, fresh off the boat from London. Said boy expires, unpleasantly, while a stranger of most peculiar manner is seen skulking in the vicinity, conspicuous by his “decidedly English accent” and “brown-parchment complexion,” suggestive of India and imperial milieus beyond. Dickens’s American publisher—better put, the only publisher in America who is paying the author royalties rather than stealing his work—sets out to solve the crime and retrieve the manuscript, with the clerk’s resourceful sister on hand to help on a journey across oceans and continents. Meanwhile, our stranger is up to more nasty business, slashing throats, sawing bones and giving people the willies. It’s clear that Pearl is having a fine time of it all, firing off a few inside jokes at the publishing business along the way: No matter that Dickens is dead with only six chapters done, says his London editor a trifle ungrammatically, for “Every reader who picks up the book, finding it unfinished, can spend their time guessing what the ending should be. And they’ll tell their friends to buy a copy and do the same, so it can be argued.”
A pleasing whodunit that resolves nicely, bookending Dan Simmons’s novel
Drood (2009) as an imaginative exercise in what might be called alternative literary history.
2) "The Reluctant Widow" by Georgette Heyer
An assured touch for whimsical turns and a lively, amusing handling of historical romance for the story of Elinor, who arrives at the wrong house for a job. She is unavoidably married to a shocking fellow on his deathbed, and is led into involuntary participation in the ambition of the dead man's uncle, Lord Carlyon, to penetrate the treasonable activities of Bonaparte agents. All of a pucker, Elinor finds her enforced widowhood dominated by Carlyon, whose monstrous coceit and doubtful behaviour keep her enraged. She also finds that strange visitors to her new estate are murdered, that she is herself in danger, that Carlyon's brothers and sisters combine to placate her. She is at last persuaded that the day is saved for England and that Carlyon's conits are chivalrous and her widowhood will end in a real wedding. Mistakes done to a turn, in Georgette Heyer's skilled manner.
3) "The Iron Wyrm Affair" by Lilith Saintcrow
Sorcery, steampunk, Sherlock Holmes and an alternate world: first of a series from the author of
Angel Town (2011, etc.).
Beneath Britain slumbers a huge, ancient, mighty dragon; if it ever wakes up, its fire will destroy the world. In Londinium, Queen Victrix, the current incarnation of the goddess Britannia, commissions Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime, to protect Archibald Clare, a failed and now unregistered mentath—due to a mistake, he served time in prison for reasons only hinted at—capable of extraordinary feats of deduction. Mentaths, for whom data manipulation is a compulsive need rather than a means to an end, have more in common with Frank Herbert's human-computer Mentats than legendary fictional detectives, however. Bannon has formidable skills, although how magic works is far from clear. She mistrusts Clare and won't give him the data he needs, while he, naturally, is extremely well-informed, except, oddly, about sorcery, and considers her illogical. Mikal, Bannon’s lone Shield, or protector (he kills nasty things that threaten her while she's preoccupied with sorcery), betrayed his previous employer, a treacherous sorcerer; secretly, he's a shape-shifting serpent—and her lover. Plot? Well, Saintcrow doles it out piecemeal, without giving Clare or the reader enough clues to add up, but somebody's killing registered mentaths and also sorcerers. The conspiracy possibly involves Cedric Grayson, Chancellor of the Exchequer. But to what end, and who's behind the conspiracy? Clearly not the clownish Grayson. Add to the mix a logic engine, dragons, gryphons, an Italian assassin, steam-powered clockhorses and the curious unavailability of hansom cabs.
Intriguing but messy; two of the chief ingredients would have sufficed, four is extreme overkill.
4) "Murder As A Fine Art" by David Morrell
In 1854, a series of senseless killings in London so closely echo the literary work of Thomas De Quincey that he becomes the principal suspect.
Writer Thomas De Quincey, best known for Confessions of an English Opium Eater, his frank memoir of his experiences with opium, also published a satirical essay entitled "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," in which he describes in appreciative detail the early-19th-century Ratcliffe Highway murders. While he's in London on a promotional tour, accompanied by his outspoken daughter, Emily, someone re-creates the Ratcliffe murders in a way that suggests the killer may be using De Quincey's piece as a blueprint. De Quincey falls under suspicion and must use his extensive knowledge of the nature of violence and regret, and his pre-Freudian theories of the subconscious, as well as his resourceful daughter and two policeman who believe in his innocence, to catch and stop the true killer, all while dealing with his crippling opium addiction. Meanwhile, the ongoing murder spree spreads increasing terror throughout London, putting the entire empire at risk. Morrell (First Blood, 1971, etc.) fills his work with extensive detail on life in London in 1854, usually in service to his story but sometimes in a gratuitous fashion. His De Quincey is quite convincing, but most of his other characters lack the same depth. Some sections are oddly and distractingly repetitive—for instance, the reader is given a detailed introduction at two different points in the novel to the real-life Dr. John Snow, who traced a cholera epidemic to a contaminated water source. In trying too hard to bring certain threads full circle, the book's climax comes across as a bit contrived. But the charming central conceit—a laudanum-chugging De Quincy chasing a killer through fog-shrouded Victorian London—goes a long way toward making up for the novel's glaring shortcomings, as do several tense, well-paced action sequences.
Fans of Victorian and/or quirky mysteries will find much to enjoy and will likely be willing to forgive the book's substantial flaws.
5) "A Beautiful Blue Death" by Charles Finch
Old-fashioned ratiocination, done up with all the Victorian bells and whistles.
When Lady Jane’s former upstairs maid Prue dies, presumably by her own hand, the gentlewoman calls on her good friend, Charles Lenox—an amateur sleuth who’s also a Roman antiquities scholar and a lover of maps, a good pipe and a decent cup of tea—to investigate. Searching the gel’s digs at the Barnard household, Lenox discovers several clues: a bottle of rare and expensive blue indigo poison, a forged suicide note, a leaf, a candle and diverse suspicious guests in residence, including two politicians, two nephews, one financier, Prue’s footman fiancé and of course Barnard himself, a Director of the Royal Mint, who was safeguarding crates of the nation’s gold in a locked room. Dumb Inspector Exeter of the Yard is called in, but makes little headway, so Lenox sends his man Graham, his brother Edmund et al. to reconnoiter. Another fatality is scheduled for the season’s main event, Barnard’s ball. Untangling the ties between the deaths solves the case in time for Lenox and Lady Jane to contemplate more congenial companions.
Finch’s rudimentary writing skills are enlivened now and then by bits of London history. On the whole, though, most Sherlockians can skip this unengaging debut without risk.
6) "Bertie and the Tinman" by Peter Lovesey
The Tinman"" was Britain's greatest 19th-century jockey, Fred Archer, who committed suicide in 1886--supposedly while in a typhoid-caused delirium. ""Bertie"" is none other than Albert Edward, Prince of Wales--who is both narrator (jaunty) and sleuth (rather clumsy) in this larky, ribald period jape. Bertie, you see, doesn't believe the typhoid story, knowing the symptoms all too well from personal experience (his father's death, his own near-fatal illness). Instead, the Prince is sure that super-jockey Archer, whom he idolized, was ""terrorized into taking his own life."" So, vowing to punish whoever's responsible, Bertie secretly turns detective, incognito--only to collect some distressing data. Archer, it seems, might have been involved in a race-fixing scam with that notorious race-track entrepreneur, ""the Squire."" Sleuthing further, Bertie beds the Squire's mistress (vaudevillian Myrtle Bliss), visits the late Archer's unlikely fiancee (the aged Countess of Montrose), takes a swim in the Thames (thanks to two thugs), and apparently triggers two more deaths: Myrtle and Bertie's sidekick, Archer's soldier-pal Charlie Buckfast, both turn up as murder victims. But Bertie, after several attempts to trap the Squire (including a naughty weekend-party), does finally triumph--with a surprise or two--over the killer. By Lovesey's own top-drawer standards (The False Inspector Dew, the Sgt. Cribb series), this frolic is a trifle disappointing--too cutesy, too thin--as a period re-creation. But it's undeniably bouncy and chortle-worthy--with added pleasure for racing fans, a splendid cameo by the dour Queen (who has her own secrets), and the anything-butstuffy narration of vain, idle, plucky Bertie.
7) "The Black Tower" by Louis Bayard
Having previously channeled Dickens and Poe, historical novelist Bayard (
The Pale Blue Eye, 2006, etc.) throws down the gauntlet to Dumas in another high-energy melodrama.
Set in early-19th-century Paris and environs, the book recounts the life-changing experience of medical student Hector Carpentier, who’s enlisted by celebrated police detective Eugène Vidocq (a real historical figure) to follow clues suggesting that members of the recently restored Bourbon monarchy known to have been executed by the Jacobins who overthrew them did not include the Dauphin Louis-Charles, younger son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A scrap of paper bearing Hector’s name, a meeting with a down-at-heels baroness and an astonishing accretion of details concerning the late M. Carpentier père, who had himself pursued a medical career, enable Vidocq to persuade the initially disbelieving Hector that his humble father, an artisan of no particular accomplishment, “might have rubbed shoulders with a Bourbon or two.” Dastardly plots, thrilling last-minute rescues and escapes, the destruction by fire of the boardinghouse run by Hector’s stoical mother and the mystery surrounding the docile man-child, who may be the one who might be king, are cast together in a whirligig narrative whose impertinent momentum never flags (despite the appearances of enough red herrings to overpopulate a sizable sea). Young Carpentier is a perfectly suitable unwilling (and quite sensibly unheroic) hero, and the ego-driven, Rabelaisian Vidocq drags the story along by his flaring coattails, never fearing any challenges to his wit and resourcefulness (his eccentric jocosity, however, often feels forced). The novel’s witty succession of trapdoor endings, culminating (we think) in “the quietest of abdications,” keeps surprising us long after it seems Bayard’s plot has nowhere else to go.
Who says they don’t write ’em like this anymore? Long may Bayard reign.
