Customer Reviews

The Detective and Mr. Dickens: Being an Account of the Macbeth Murders and the Strange Events Surrounding Them

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I find it hard to get past the writing style, which does not come across as convincingly Victorian and is not Mr. Palmer's strong suit (he fails to employ simple devices that can render the language more pleasing, such as varying his vocabulary within a paragraph - he would rather repeat terms such as "crowd" three times or more in the space of two sentences, instead of introducing "throng," "mob," "multitudes," etc.). It does not help that my edition is riddled with printing errors; even the editor's note spells history wrong ("histroy") on page one, and has at least one footnote error (citing "Women in White" instead of "Woman in White" - a grievous slip-up in a piece purporting to be by the author Wilkie Collins). Suspense, however, Palmer does well, so that despite the distractions of language and typographical errors, the book still manages to be a sufficient page-turner to get through at least the first few chapters. As to finishing the book, however, I'm afraid this ranks as one of those "life is too short" selections that gets abandoned before the mystery is solved.

Dr. Joe Palmer was one of my English professors at Purdue University. This novel (and the two "sequels") display the same enthusiasm and love of the Victorian era he brought to the classroom. These books provide interesting historical and biographical details, but are by no means too high-brow or scholarly for mystery fans. If you like Anne Perry, you must read Joe Palmer.

William J. Palmer's literary mystery stretches the form without crossing the line. Charles Dickens tackles impressively (readers with ancient leg injuries which occasionally act up may wish to avert their eyes) & swims fairly well under pressure. Wilkie Collins conquers a potentially disastrous case of priggishness & may be making serious advances against chronic foppery. Inspector William Field, Irish Meg Sheehey, & the extravagantly gifted Talley Ho Thompson, some sort of grinning dervish genius pickpocket Robin Hood, but watch your watch, all come to life easily & naturally, unburdened by heavy novelistic responsibilities. Ellen Ternan is only awfully pretty so far, but may turn interesting as she ages up nearer to legal. Read the next one, if you can procure a copy anywhere (Amazon seems out), & there may be a third. Palmer can write, & knows how to drop an occasional pearl of wisdom lightly, without needlessly infuriating his patrons. There is a single profoundly unfortunate multi-layer allusion & one short example of illicit typography, but these petty faults are easily overbalanced by genuinely sane handling of the early death of Dickens' daughter Dora plus the best Victorian wenchfight I have ever read. A bonafide romp. This fun is serious. Buy it.

Charles Dickens, as many of his fans know, was not only a beloved novelist but a philanthropist, reporter, and magazine editor, and apparently wont to take on protegees (such as Wilkie Collins, the narrator of this historical-mystery pastiche) who later went on to success in their own right. Late in 1849, when Dickens was 37 and Collins going on 25, the pair attend the public hanging of a notorious murderess and there become acquainted with Insp. Field of "the Metropolitan Protectives," an early form of the London Police. When Dickens is able to identify a violently slain body as that of a lawyer known to his biographer John Forster, the pair are drawn into Field's efforts to solve the case. Since, as one of Field's officers observes, "[this isn't] like trampin' into some Rats' Castle and 'aulin' out our man for questionin'," the Inspector requests their aid in running down the killer--"It takes a gentleman to catch a gentleman," and Dickens's connections with the theater (the victim was last seen at the Players' Club) make him an obvious source of knowledge and information. Soon another body is discovered, and as Dickens meets and becomes attracted to a teenaged Ellen Ternan and she is threatened with abduction and defilement, the case becomes a very personal one for him.

Like Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. (Norton Paperback) and The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D., the book is full of local color (much of it perhaps a bit *too* colorful, in that the mystery turns on the hidden sexual hypocrisy of the age) and actual historical individuals, ranging from debauched nobility to noted Shakespearean Charles Macready to the hapless young actress who eventually became Dickens's mistress. There's also a semi-reformed pickpocket who becomes charmed with detective work and a young Irish prostitute who becomes a very close...*friend* of Collins's. Extensive (and occasionally distracting) footnotes by the "editor" of Collins's manuscript enlarge upon some of the references. Whether later volumes in the series are as explicit as this one I don't know, but I'm willing to give them a try and find out.

I love historical mysteries. This one is not quite in the league of Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and it's less cerebral than The Dante Club, but definitely an enjoyable light read that I recommend to fans of the genre and fans of Charles Dickens.