"The Demoniacs" by John Dickson Carr

 

Did the old lady found next to a chest of jewels in a house on old London Bridge in 1757 really die of fright? And was her death connected to a runaway heiress and her uncle's mistress? Bow Street runner Jeffrey Wynne investigates on behalf of blind Sir John Fielding.

This novel is set in Georgian London and features the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, made famous in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (half-brother of the real-life Sir John), Newgate prison and a pre-Tussauds waxworks, and even visiting clergyman Laurence Sterne (real-life author of Tristram Shandy and real-life member of a Hell-Fire club called The Demoniacs). It's a glorious pre-Regency romp complete with duelling and carriages careering over the cobbles at breakneck speed and scandalous secrets. There is a hideously over-complicated family tree which utterly baffled me. The identity of the murderer also baffled me but when the denouement came and the clues that had been scattered throughout the text were explained, I thought: 'Of course, of course, of course. I should have spotted that, I should have thought of that.' And that is the mark of a satisfying whodunnit. 

John Dickson Carr was a prolific writer of whodunnits, specialising in the 'locked room mystery'; he was perhaps best known for a series of books starring Dr Gideon Fell. He also wrote a number of historical murder mysteries. This is an excellent example of the genre.

Selected quotes:

• "Mrs Lavinia Cresswell, widow, could have passed for thirty anywhere except in the broad daylight most fashionable ladies avoided." (Ch 2)
• "To praise a woman because she has never exercised her sex is as though you should praise a man because he has never exercised his brains." (Ch 2)

August 2024; 216 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Felicity Hunters" by Deirdre Connolly

Lara's grandmother was in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war; the first Lara hears of this is at her funeral. Lara determines to investigate her family history and her new job teaching in Singapore provides the perfect opportunity to meet relatives in Australia. But why are they hostile? And who is the person in the floppy hat who stalks her around the world? And what has all this to do with Lara's inherited trusteeship of a family charity?

This is a well-written first novel; a Robert Goddard style mystery (for example, Play to the End) in which the past exerts a long shadow over the present. It also gives a fascinating insight into the conditions faced by expatriate teachers in Singapore. There are some great descriptions:

• "The ebbing tide had created a canvas of yellow rippled sand sculptures around sapphire ponds" (C 5)
• "I pulled myself away and ambled deeper into the gorge, a living masterpiece with layer upon layer of interest, from birdsong echoing against the cliff walls to wallabies making fleeting appearances in the bushland bordering the contrasting Victorian gardens." (C 11)

And other great lines:

• "In my experience, people either want to talk about things like that interminably, or not at all." (C 3)
• "We sampled introductory offers at spas, enjoying hours of scrubs, massages and ginger tea until our bodies had no more toxins to surrender." (C 8)
• "The first splinter of dawn pierced the skies outside my window" (C 11)
• "You know that glow I always wear in Singapore, well that’s calories seeping out through my pores." (C 22)

Well worth a read. May 2019

"The Dead Duke, his Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse" by Pie Marie Eatwell

The 5th Duke of Portland was a weird bloke. He hated being seen and lived a more or less invisible life, either at his London residence or at Welbeck Abbey, near Worksop. His hobby seemed to be to build a vast network of underground rooms and passages beneath the Abbey. He kept himself to himself and didn't seem to like women.

Thomas Charles Druce had no birth or baptismal certificate. Following a brief spell living in Bury St Edmunds as a 'linen draper' he disappeared for a while and then reappeared as a department store owner. He had three illegitimate children, then he married their mother and had another three legitimate children before he died in 1864.

In 1898 the widow of his eldest legitimate son claimed that Druce was actually the alter ego of the 4th Duke, that the burial was a sham, that the grave was empty, and that therefore her son was the rightful heir of the Portland Estate. She applied to have the grave opened to see if there was indeed a body in it. But the Duke, and Druce's eldest (illegitimate) son who had inherited his father's money (but could not inherit any title) blocked the move.

The court case dragged on for years.

This superbly written book takes us through the dimensions of this mystery. Eatwell delves into and dissects the claims, counter-claims, perjuries and hidden truths. Some aspects are really spooky and she brings the tension out. She answers questions: why did Druce not marry his wife until after the first three children were born. Some questions she cannot answer: what did Druce do when he disappeared, why is their no record of his birth, who was he? But the excitement continues to the end.

A brilliant, weird, true life page-turner. October 2015; 300 pages

"The Janissary Tree" by Jason Goodwin

This historical thriller cum detective story is set in Istanbul in 1836 and stars an investigator called Yashim who is a eunuch. In fact, there are lots and lots of eunuchs not to mention Preen the dancing boy and his 'girl' friends. There is also a wonderful Polish ambassador who no longer has a country but still receives an allowance from the Sultan, a clever modernising Sultan who is just a bid fed up of having to have yet another girl in his bed every night, a whole harem of beauties, the formidable Sultan's mother (a childhood friend of the Empress Josephine) and a fabulous wife of the Russian ambassador.

The plot concerns the New Guard who are being trained in modern warfare because the old Janissaries, the Sultan's praetorian guard, have become a state within a state. They used to select the new sultan, strangling the old one with a silk bowstring.

The plot is far fetched (artfully arranged corpses designed as a mezze before the main meal of insurrection) and there are various unsuccessful attempts at assassinating Yashim and his confederates (which don't quite work with the plot revealed at the end) but the power of this delightful book is the window into a wonderfully colourful and utterly bizarre world. From the arcane rules of the guild of soup-makers to Yashim's own cooking; from fighting fires to fighting assassins in the disgusting surroundings of a tannery; from dancing boys to eunuchs (of different types) to the harem; old Istanbul and her traditions explode onto the scene as a riot of colour and smell and flavour.

This novel created a world as rich and wonderful as Gormenghast (but considerably more colourful) with some fabulously strong characters. Great fun. October 2015; 329 pages

"The Botticelli Secret" by Marina Fiorato

Luciana Vetra, "part time model and full time whore" poses for Flora in Botticelli's Primavera. Little does she know when she purloins an unfinished sketch of the masterpiece that she is unleashing a trail of murder and treachery. For the painting holds a secret that her and novice monk Brother Guido must unravel if they are to stay one step ahead of the killers.

This is a brilliant romp through renaissance Italy visiting Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Milan and Genoa.  The heroine is a fabulously feisty strumpet with a wonderful line in earthy epithets; the monk gives the unlikely-to-be-requited love interest and the book learning; the whores mother is a brilliantly complex character in whom the political and the maternal instincts are often at war.

There are points when it was disturbingly similar to the book that I am writing with its themes of secrets hidden within a painting, a child whose noble birth has been concealed, priests and churches and betrayal. But Fiorato has provided me with a lesson in how to write with verve and vigour and never to get bogged down in over-complicating character, scenery or plot.

And it is so much better written than the da Vinci code! March 2015; 548 pages

"Heartstone" by C.J.Sansom

Matthew Shardlake, hunchbacked lawyer, investigates crimes in the England of Henry VIII. In this book he travels into Hampshire to find out whether a young orphan is being cheated of his inheritance by the man who has bought his wardship. At the same time he tries to discover why Ellen has been committed to Bedlam despite there being no certificate of lunacy: what is the secret buried in her past? All this is set to the background of preparations for Henry VIII's final war against France: the French fleet is off Portsmouth and there are rumours of invasion. The book climaxes with Shardlake on board the Mary Rose as the capsizes.

This is written with all the verve that characterises Sansom's Shardlake series (also see entries on Dissolution and Dark Fire). He is exceptional on describing scenes though sometimes I thought there was a little too much incidental detail in this book and not enough concentration on the plot: the journey down to Hampshire with the company of archers, for example, took several chapters and could have been axed without disruption to the narrative.

"The secret rooms" by Catherine Bailey

In 1940, John, 9th Duke of Rutland, died alone in a draughty room off the servants' quarters of Belvoir Castle, a room in which he had lived and worked alone, more or less continuously, for two years. The rooms were then sealed for sixty years.

When Catherine Bailey gained access to them, to work on a history of the First World War, she discovered that John had been assembling, or perhaps dissembling, the family archives. Here were copies of all their letters. Except there were three missing periods within the records. From the evidence of the butterfly clips that held packets of letters together, the evidence for these periods had been removed by John, while he was compiling the archives.

The first relates to a time when John was eight and his elder brother died.

The second relates to 1909, when John was a reluctant diplomat in Rome.

The third relates to a period between July and December 1915 when John was in the British Army during the First World War. The third missing period corresponds exactly to the time when John's war diary suddenly goes blank.

What were the secrets hidden by the missing evidence? Were they all linked?

The start of this book reads like the most exciting thriller, perhaps a classic Robert Goddard such as Long time coming or Blood count. I am a fan of this genre. Bailey adds neat touches: she jumps around in time between the story of John and the story of her researches; her prose is sparse and matter-of-fact as if the mystery is quite the opposite; there is the wonderful moment when she leaves the allegedly haunted room in which the Duke died in search of a coffee, only to be surprised by a woman "in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid."

I could scarcely read this book fast enough. However, as we approach the end the story is marred by the endless quotations from family letters. Most of these letters help to add a little extra to the puzzle but they also contain many trivial details that are not necessary. In short, she could have shortened it.

And in the end, not all the details are resolved. Thus is real life unlike a thriller but it is unsatisfactory although it gives one the sense of enduring mystery and the hope that someone one day might resolve the remaining puzzles.

Nevertheless, this was a cracking read. May 2013; 425 pages