Ham and Pea Soup: A Rare Interest in Corpses

A Rare Interest in Corpses by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 410

Marketed in some territories as The Companion, this is the first novel in what becomes a historical crime series set in Victorian London. After her father’s death in 1864, the penniless Elizabeth (Lizzie) Martin takes up a position as companion to Mrs Parry, her god-father’s wealthy widow, only to find that her predecessor, Madeleine Hexham, who had supposedly run off with an unknown man, is dead (and pregnant). Madeleine’s body is discovered in the recently-demolished slums around the prestigious new railway station at St Pancras, and Inspector Benjamin Ross is in charge of the investigation. Lizzie realises that she knows Ross from her childhood (her father sponsored his education) and that ‘Aunt’ Parry, as she is encouraged to call her, was a landlord for the housing development, causing several elements to build up into a classic detective mystery.

Through the use of alternating chapters between Lizzie and Ross, we are drip-fed information about the developments and social mores of the times, ranging from scientific progress to insights into the working of and attitudes to the police force, and personal relationships.

London is changing and the era is one of rapid development: the capitalist society dictates the rich will get richer while the poor are further oppressed. Mr Fletcher runs the construction company which is building the station on the grounds of the housing Mrs Parry sold to the railway for development. He doesn’t want the police involved on his worksite, because people are fascinated when a body is found. Mrs Parry is equally uncomfortable. “No one wants to be known as a slum landlord and after Madeleine’s body was found there, she liked even less the idea that people would associate her with the place.”

St Pancras Station in the course of building (1871)

Morals and attitudes to women are also questioned. The supposedly religious and upstanding Dr Tibbett expresses his conservative reactionary views to Lizzie in a manner that demonstrates the constraints within which she must work. “I am sorry to say I find increasingly that there is a type of modern young woman who fancies she may speak as freely as a man. I am an old-fashioned fellow who believes that woman is the greatest ornament to her sex when she realises the boundaries Nature has set for her.” He, and others, blame female victims when they are exploited and abused. “We did not know the circumstances of Madeleine’s death. Whatever Tibbett had to say it would amount to declaring that it was all her own fault.”

This is a world in which class distinctions are rife and supremely hierarchical. Inspector Ross comes from mining stock and has risen through the ranks; his superiors dislike him because he is working class. He notes that the social strata extends to the upstairs/ downstairs milieu of the masters and servants. “I reflected that below stairs there existed a world which, in true Darwinian fashion, had evolved quite differently to society above. Had the great naturalist set himself to study it, he might have found as much of interest there as he had in Terra del Fuego.” Although this is the first in the series about Benjamin Ross and Elizabeth Martin, it is evident that there will be more, and that Lizzie and Ben will end up together; they are both honest and self-aware with a strong moral backbone.

The novel is full of the classic features of the Victorian detective drama. The dim-witted Dunn (Ross’s superior officer) struggles to solve the mystery, announcing, “This is turning into a dashed complicated business, regular cat’s-cradle of possible motives.” There is a dressing table with a hidden drawer in which Lizzie conveniently finds a diary written by the dead woman. Thick Victorian fogs made of coal fire smoke and freezing atmospheric conditions add to the ambience and there is even a standard chase through the pea-souper. It is satisfying without being too demanding and a thoroughly enjoyable addition to the genre.

George du Maurier cartoon in Punch, 1889

Cliched Romantic Claptrap: A Matter of Grave Concern

 

A Matter of Grave Concern by Brenda Novak

Montlake Romance

Pp.325

Brenda Novak has written over 50 novels and is a New York Times Bestselling Author, so she clearly has a following, although if trying to place her genre it would be somewhere on the misogynistic side of historical romance. This novel begins with an interesting premise about Abigail Hale, a woman who buys corpses to supply the medical school, run by her father, with cadavers. These corpses are often found illegally by grave robbers or, worse, people who kill in order to have a fresh stock of bodies. 

Resurrectionists by phiz

One of the grave robbers in The London Supply Company, Max Wilder, is actually a nobleman in disguise, trying to find out what happened to his step-sister who has disappeared and he fears she has been murdered. This scenario is interesting, but it all goes rapidly downhill when Abby goes to the home of the leader of the gang, Big Jack, to recover the money they took from her. She is captured and she falls in love with Max, who supposedly protects her, but also initiates her sexually while holding her captive; it’s all very distasteful and the sexual fantasy element seems misguided.

Abby dreams of being a surgeon, although women are forbidden from practicing medicine. Supposedly she has some feminist leanings, but she still likes to be dominated and falls for her captor. She refers often to the plight of women in the late Regency period, “Because she refused to adopt the role society tried to press upon her, she had always fought to fit in, even at the college. Lecturers and students alike couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be content to sit in the corner and darn socks.” Women have few options, apart from to go to the alms-houses, which “provided such a cruel and meagre existence that no one wanted to end up there”, and of course, there is prostitution.

There are offerings of historical information which do not blend with the plot, and land with a clang, such as the mention of “Sir Robert Peel’s new police force” or “the notorious gentleman’s guide to the current brothels and prostitutes in London – Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.” It is as though Novak wants to educate as well as titivate, and she is far from subtle with the introduction of knowledge, but she also writes of England for an American market, as evidenced by her slips of language. Although Max is a high class noble (Lucien Cavendish, the Duke of Rowenberry), he tells Abby to, ‘Quit being so smug”, which is not an English expression of any era.

Interior with a Sleeping Man and a Woman Darning Socks by Wybrand Hendricks

Max is supposedly heroic and appealing in the way he cares for Abby, and she is drawn to his male magnetism and controlling aspect. “Max Wilder couldn’t be classified as a saint. There was something dangerous about him, something bordering on the uncivilized. From what she had seen so far, he dared more than a man should. He flouted whatever rule he chose to flout, and seemed to have no compunction about asserting his will in any given situation, regardless of how it affected others.” The novel constantly switches viewpoint, and we are meant to believe that a man so used to getting his own way is attracted to someone who might question his authority.

Abby admits her love for Max only to discover he is betrothed to another woman through an old alliance between families; of course it wouldn’t do for him to have any romantic attachment to anyone but her. Although she is now pregnant with his child (and we have been told about the consequences of unwed motherhood), she does the ‘decent thing’ by not telling him. “If she loved him, she would support him in what would make him the happiest, and she knew what that was.” This is patently ridiculous and a romance novel trope; one of many. There are long scenes of what Max and Abby feel for each other, but the actual plot hurries towards the end. In the last few chapters there are stabbings, abduction, hangings, and circumnavigations of the globe which appear to take weeks rather than months.

The sexual politics are at best uncomfortable and at worse downright offensive. As for the narrative, all of the potential interest in a story about grave robbers, medical science, and a young woman trying to negotiate a life in a man’s world is swept away on a torrent of clichéd romantic claptrap.

It's Not About the Girl: The Girl Before

The Girl Before by JP Delaney

Quercus

Pp. 406

Edward has designed a house that is minimalist in appearance, with all the modern technology to make it seem almost sentient. To rent One Folgate Street, with its open-plan features, floating staircase and clean spaces, potential tenants must answer a series of questions before gaining admittance. Once they have been accepted, they understand that he has a sense of authority over them. Everything in the house is computerised and Edward controls the computer; if the tenants don’t answer the questions to his satisfaction, he will turn off the lights or the hot water for the shower. The questions get increasingly pertinent and personal, as the house computer search engine will only respond with certain information, and it collates all the findings to provide ‘helpful hints’. The novel questions when being cared for becomes being spied on; when does being protected become being stifled?

It is clear that Edward is a control-freak. He needs to control all aspects of his – and others’ – lives; not just their living arrangements. He cooks in a very methodical manner with precisely the right hard-to-find ingredients; he admires foreign things so that he can appear knowledgeable and correct people’s pronunciation to constantly assert authority. He also likes the Japanese custom of hitobashira, which he tells a tenant is about burying dead people under buildings, but she later finds out it refers to burying the living. So far; so creepy.

But wait; there’s more. He has very similar relationships with very similar women, two of whom live in his house and narrate alternate chapters. Jane is ‘now’. She has had a stillbirth which makes her vulnerable; she has memories which Edward triggers, she thinks accidentally. Emma was ‘then’. She had been attacked and raped by burglars – her partner, Simon, adores her, but can’t live by her stringent rules or those of the house. Jane’s friend, Mia, points out how much Jane looks like Emma, the previous tenant, who died in the house, and Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, before that. Emma defends him, “Men often go for the same type. Women do too, of course. It’s just that in our case, it isn’t usually physical resemblance so much as personality.” But when does it stop being a ‘type’ and become a fetish?

Past experiences are repeated in the present; the lines Edward uses echo over each other as he says them to both women and they find themselves starting to question his past. When Jane questions Edward about his former relationship (his wife and previous tenant both died in suspicious circumstances), he tells her not to look into it. “The past is over; that’s why it’s the past. Let it go, will you?” There are heavy-handed metaphors about clean slates with faintly discernible chalk marks from previous writings, and if we hadn’t already got the point, Jane spells it out for the hard of understanding with a high-school art essay about palimpsests and pentimenti.

As with any novel including the word ‘girl’ in the title, it seems we must have sex, violence, and an unreliable narrator. It is also worth bearing in mind that it is written by a man. A policeman advises Emma, “We take cases of rape very seriously. That means assuming every woman who says she’s been raped is telling the truth. The flipside of that is that we take false rape allegations equally seriously.” This suggests they are equally common. Fact check: over the past 20 years, only 2% of rape accusations proved to be false. It’s not that men can’t write realistic female characters, but a reliance on pop psychology and simplified gender stereotypes doesn’t help.

The Girl Before is not about a girl, before, after or present. It is about a house and a man’s viewpoint of manipulation and control. It is an entertaining read, but it is not earth-shattering. Shock value isn’t everything, and its veneer wears off very quickly.