Murder As A Fine Art
by David Morrell
2013, Little, Brown, & Co. hc
ISBN: 978-0-316-21679-1
Introduction, Afterword, Postscript, 358pp
A Review by Gene Stewart
Yes, the title echoes the book by Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, first sensationalist, transgressive, and participatory journalism of its kind. Wilkie Collins was decades in the future when De Quincey rose to notoriety.
Another De Quincey piece was “On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts”, an ironic, satirical essay about the infamous Ratcliffe Highway Murders, in which businessmen and family members, including a baby in a cradle, were butchered in a set of crimes that seemed to have no sense to them.
The crimes terrified all of England, being the first of that depraved, mass sort in memory. Worse, newspapers were just coming into their own in 1811, along with mail coaches connecting towns, villages, and hamlets to London, where it happened, so news spread faster at that time than ever before. So did fear.
The Ratcliffe Highway Murders happened 77 years before Jack the Ripper tore his bloody swath. De Quincey’s light-hearted, deadpan sarcasm about them stirred more ire than knowing nods. Taken literally, his writing made him seem depraved, lurid, and irresponsible.
When Morrell’s atmospheric, beautifully-researched novel opens, it is 1854, when new murders seem to be using De Quincey’s essay as blueprint. The old man falls under suspicion and, with his plucky daughter, who takes care of him, heads out to clear his name. Turns out he’s old but not frail. Spry and mentally agile, observant beyond his compatriots, De Quincey is quickly immersed in layered patterns of crime, destitution, and desperate measures. Some of the connections only he knows; are they due to his severe opium addiction?
Helping him is a young policeman hoping to make detective rank, who has seen more than his superiors perhaps want him to have seen. With a genius murderer bent on making art of death, this hapless trio is always caught between the authorities and a dark presence who seems society’s nemesis, a killer of astounding evil.
Morrell’s brilliant conception for this novel is revealed in the web woven among strands from the highest British aristocrats to its lowest, most-detested denizens of poverty’s lowest hell. We see vivid depictions from all levels of Victorian society.
The novel includes much wonderful detail. It spans references to the wars and vicious repression that kept the Raj strong, and delves into the opium trade, of which De Quincey is by no means the only victim. Powerful interests want to keep the status quo, even as a killer and an addict pursue revelations that may threaten Victorian society itself.
Along the way, we learn fascinating things about the prison systems back then, the opium trade’s trade-offs, London’s parks, London’s sewers, and how everyday life was lived, among much else.
The pacing is thriller all the way, layered with classic mystery elements and dashing facets from a modern perspective. The people are real, the situations gritty, grim, and intense, and the atmosphere of the book is fog-bound, shadowy, and eerie, befitting a tale of blood-splashing murder and near-miss chases.
Altogether satisfying and huge fun to read, Murder As A Fine Art is David Morrell at the top of his considerable skills.
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Interested readers may wish to note, too, Lloyd Shepherd’s 2012 novel, The English Monster, which is a fictional treatment of the Ratcliffe Murders, out currently in a British edition from Simon & Schuster UK. I found a copy at Half Priced Books in trade pb.
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