Three years ago, I read Dan
Simmons Drood, a fictional account
of writer Charles Dickens last five years as he toiled to finish what was to be
his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood –which he never did. Simmons was able to mix a factual biography from
the lives of Dickens, Wilke Collins, and other literary and historical figures
of the Victorian era into a complex plot, which was long, but well executed.
David Morrell does the same here,
somewhat, by using a real person, essayist Thomas De Quincey, and landing him
into a 1854 London, a city that is suddenly and violently thrown asunder when a
murder resembling a mass killing from 40 years ago takes place. De Qunicey was
famous for writing his account of being addicted to laudanum - tincture of
opium containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight (the equivalent of
1% morphine) - in Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater. At the time, and many decades later, the idea of a man
of well means –the stiff upper crust of Victorian England- would lower his “station”
and broadcast his personal life for all the world to read was seen as
horrifying.
He also wrote On Murder Considered as one of the Fine
Arts, a fictional, satirical account of an address made to a gentleman's
club concerning the aesthetic appreciation of murder. It focused particularly
on a series of murders allegedly committed in 1811 by John Williams in the
neighborhood of Ratcliffe Highway, London. Williams was the one and only prime
suspect, though today everything the police had on him seemed circumstantial at
best. As it was pointed out, the courts of that time gave greater weight to
logic and eyewitness testimony than to any forensic evidence. The concept was
that if a narrative fit the facts and made sense, then more than likely that
person was guilty). Williams, who was arrested just before Christmas, never
lived to stand trial, as he hung himself over the Christmas holiday. His suicide,
it was then recorded, meant he was guilty.
Morrell’s novel brings the aged De
Quincey and his devoted daughter Emily to London in December of 1854. Though
the author is in debt, the trip and their lodgings were paid for by someone
else, a person who also claims to have knowledge of a prostitute named Ann whom
De Quincey fall in love with fifty years ago, but is desperate to learn her
fate. Then a series of ferocious mass murders, identical to ones that
terrorized London forty-three years earlier, takes place and De Quincey becomes
the number one suspect, as the blueprint for the killings seems to be his
classic essay on the Ratcliffe Highway killings. Desperate to clear his name
but also crippled by his opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his outspoken Emily
and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives.
The book is a fine psychological thriller,
and Morrell has created some wonderful characters that crackle off the page. De
Quincey’s addiction runs through the entire book and the author has obviously
done a lot of research into addiction and into the mind of a killer. Much like
Caleb Carr’s The Alienst, the book
is also somewhat about the early days of forensic science, when investigators
began looking at killers and their victims differently. Also present you see
the dark side of London, the fog (which at times could be considered a
character), the soot, the class structure that seems to persist even today.
Much like what Simmons tried to evoke
with Drood, Morrell's does a great
job in blending fact and fiction and reads like a Wilke Collins novel (the man
that is credited for creating the first real novel of suspense) from the
19th-century. You’ll swear, as you turn the pages, “that you'll hear the hooves
clattering on cobblestones, the racket of dustmen, and the shrill call of
vendors.”
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