"Death Comes But Twice" by David Field

It's London, 1902. Dr. James Carlyle of the London Hospital in Whitechapel has discovered something very odd. He’s examining the body of a dead man and discovers his fingerprints match those of a criminal – a man hung some time before. How can a man die twice? 

Carlyle calls upon Matthew West, a Wesleyan minister serving in a mission who’s worked with Carlyle on a previous case. West, as it turns out, was the minister who accompanied the criminal to his hanging. But he didn’t see anything unusual; in fact, he didn’t see anything at all, as he always shuts his eyes when he attends an execution.

 

But West goes to Newgate Prison to look at the visitor ledgers, and he discover that a woman had visited the condemned man four times before his hanging. He also notes who else attended the execution. And then he, Carlyle, and Carlyle’s very modern and outspoken daughter Adelaide discover that everyone involved in the execution are dying one by one. And Matthew West may be next. Com;licating Matthew’s life is the appearance of an older women who seems to be doing her best to seduce the minister.

 

David Field

Matthew is in love with Adelaide, but without a parish of his own and a stable income, he has no means to provide for a wife. For her part, Adelaide seems to go out of her way to keep the minister at arm’s length, even as he helps her with an election campaign. That is, until he’s threatened first with seduction and then bodily harm. 

 

Death Comes But Twice by David Field is the second of four books in the Carlyle & West Victorian Mystery Series. The first is Interviewing the Dead, the third is Confronting the Invisible, and the fourth is Death Among the Nightingales. It’s a historical mystery that has a fascinating premise supported by rich historical detail and a growing romance. That detail includes the then nascent science of fingerprints, which were just coming into use by police organizations but had yet to be tested in court.

 

Field also written six historical novels set in Tudor England and eight novels in the Esther and Jack Enright Mystery Series. A native of Nottingham, England, he practiced and taught criminal law for his professional career. He now lives in Australia.

 

It’s a fun, enjoyable series, full of late Victorian and early Edwardian history.

 

Related:

 

Interviewing the Dead by David Field.

"The Essex Serpent" by Sarah Perry

It’s London, 1893. Cora Seaborne has just buried her husband, a highly regarded professional well-known for his expertise in the halls of Parliament. He was also something of a sadist; he liked to inflict pain upon his wife. Cora is not exactly sorry to see him gone.

Left well-off by her husband’s death, she moves with her rather odd 10-year-old son Francis and her companion Martha to Essex. She throws herself into the countryside. She walks, she hikes, she digs, she explores. The local inhabitants take Cora in their stride, although they wonder at her rather odd behavior, which includes wearing an overlarge coat and men’s boots. She throws herself into the natural world and all things of science related to it. When she hears rumors of a beast the locals call the Essex serpent, a demon-like thing that lives in the marshes and is responsible for missing pets and livestock, she decides to find it.

One of the local families she meets and becomes good friends with is that of the vicar, William Ransome. He is rather taken by Cora, even though she holds views that he clearly rejects. He also thinks the stories of the serpent are nonsense. And while he is devoted to his wife Stella, who’s increasingly beset by consumption (tuberculosis), he enjoys Cora’s company and the two talk many long walks together. And they argue about the serpent.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry is many things. It is first a historical novel, and Perry captures the countryside and the London of the 1890s extraordinarily well. Second, it is a different kind of historical novel in that it does not play to the standard picture we have of the late Victorian period. Or as Perry points out in an afterword, she discovered that the Victorian period, once you moved beyond the caricatures, was a period not unlike out own.

Third, the novel is about science and religion. It is not a story of the battle between the two, although there is clearly conflict. But just as two dissimilar people as Cora and William come to realize they need each other, so, too, does science and religion.

And then there’s that serpent, which comes to represent far more than a local folk tale or a possible prehistoric beast or fish that has somehow managed to survive.

Sarah Perry

Perry’s first novel, which received a wide array of literary recognitions, was After Me Comes the Flood (2014). She’s also received awards for travel writing. She received an M.A. degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. degree in creative writing and the Gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. The Essex Serpent was a No. 1 bestseller in hardback in Britain, was named Waterstone’s Book of the Year for 2016, and was nominated for a slew of literary awards. Perry lives in Norwich, England.

It’s easy to see why The Essex Serpent has gained so many recognitions and so many accolades. It’s well written. It has a fascinating story and recognizable characters, characters that the reader takes to and sympathizes with. And it’s powerful: it starts slowly and carefully, and you wonder where all this is going. But then you’re caught, and you realize that this story simply won’t let go, even after the last page.

Related:

‘I was wonderstruck; transfixed by strangeness’ – Sarah Perry’s account in The Guardian of seeing a mirage (the Fata Morgana); a similar sighting involes a key scene in The Essex Serpent.

Twenty Questions with Sarah Perry – The Times Literary Supplement.

Top photograph: Salt marshes in Essex, England, via CoastalCare.org.

“A Most Inconvenient Death” by Donna Fletcher Crow

It is 1847. Charles Leighton, Viscount Danvers, is at the Ketteringham estate of Sir John Boileau, helping to celebrate the coming of age of Sir John’s son and heir, Jack. It’s quite a gathering, including a duchess and several other titled people. Then, at nearby Stanfield Hall, two members of the Jermy family are murdered by masked men with guns. Boileau, as county magistrate, must investigate, and Leighton helps him.

Suspicions quickly center on a farmer, James Rush. But Leighton isn’t convinced, even if Sir John and the police are. He knows that several people owed money to the Jermys, including Sir John’s son Jack. And Leighton saw Jack leaving with a rifle shortly before the murders occurred.

The investigation of the murders frames the narrative of A Most Inconvenient Death by Donna Fletcher Crow. It’s a Victorian period mystery story that includes a troubled hero (Leighton is still mourning the woman he was to marry), air balloon rides, long English celebrations at country houses that we associate with the 19^th century, a wonderful dowager duchess who might give Maggie Smith some serious competition on Downton Abbey, and even a spot of romance.

Donna Fletcher Crow

Crow is the author of some 50 books, mostly novels about British history. She has two other novels in the Lord Danvers series, Grave Matters and To Dust You Shall Return, and a second mystery novel series under the theme of The Monastery Murders.  A Most Inconvenient Death was originally published in 1993 and republished in 2011 and 2017. Crow lives in Idaho.

The delightful thing about historical mysteries is that they’re never really dated. A Most Inconvenient Death is a Victorian era whodunit involving rich and poor, titled and common, money and debt, constant guessing as to whom the killer (or killers) might be, and one wild climactic ending.

Top photograph: the type of clothing style Lord Danvers would have worn in the 1840s. Courtesy the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

James Wilson’s “The Dark Clue”

It is 1850s Victorian Britain. The great British painter J.M.W. Turner has been dead since 1851, and a rather unscrupulous writer is researching a biography of him. Turner’s friends and supporters are alarmed, so they commission a biography as well. Artist Walter Hartright is convinced by his sister Marian Halcombe to undertake the assignment, and she will assist him in his research.

As Walter and Marian undertake their project, they soon learn that nothing about Turner is what it seems. The artist appears to have been a bundle of contradictions. As the brother and sister are pulled deeper into the story of Turner’s life, they begin to sense dark forces at work. What starts out as a biographical project becomes a descent into darkness – and possible madness.

Published in 2002, The Dark Clue is author James Wilson’s recreation of the Victorian suspense novel. In fact, the characters of Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe are borrowed directly from what may be the classic Victorian suspense novel – The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Wilson goes beyond a simple recreation of the times of the Victorian 1850s, however. He transports the reader and almost seductively places you there, so that you experience, see, and even smell what is happening in the story, as it envelops and happens around you.

Turner (1775-1851) was an artist who transformed landscape painting. He made his name when he was quite young, exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Art on a regular basis for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t without controversy – one can see the rather large collection of his paintings at the Tate Britain (he bequeathed them to the nation at his death) and see the forerunner of Impressionism and even abstract art. As he grew older, Turner became increasingly absorbed with painting light; while his paintings seem familiar to us in the 21^st century, many of them seemed odd and puzzling to his own contemporaries.

He painted light – but his own life contained elements of darkness. And it those elements, along with the darkness of Victorian Britain, that Wilson mines in The Dark Clue. He structures the novel in three parts. The first is Walter’s perspective; the second is Marian’s; and the third is a combination of both. The Turner biography leads both characters, and especially Walter, to the brink of madness, as they journey deeper and deeper into his life – and art.

Turner as a young man, self-portrait (1799)

Wilson takes the story where a writer like Wilkie Collins might have wanted to take it but could not, given the sensibilities of the day. And it is at the point that the story becomes too dark, the main characters too personally entangled, for this to be only an impressive, perhaps even brilliant, recreation of the suspense novels of the period. It’s at that point the story becomes disappointing; it does not need the titillation that it includes. The author could have restrained himself, and his characters, but he does not. And at that point the story becomes something else, something less Victorian and more contemporary. To have remained true to Victorian sentiment he would have had to only suggest and perhaps hide.

That may have been the point; Wilson may have been attempting to do with The Dark Clue what Turner did with his paintings. Had he stopped short, he might have achieved it.

The Tate Britain currently has an exhibition of Turner paintings, Late Turner: Painting Set Free. The exhibition runs to Jan. 25, and we were fortunate enough to see it during a recent trip to London.

Painting: The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, watercolor by J.M.W.Turner, 1842, The Tate Britain.