Customer Reviews

Salisbury Manuscript

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THE SALISBURY MANUSCRIPT (Ama. Sleuth-Tom Ansell-England-1837) - G+
Gooden, Philip - standalone
Soho Constable, 2008, UK Hardcover - ISBN; 9781569475126

First Sentence: The man turned aside from the farm-track as the autumn afternoon closed in and storm clouds were scudding from the west.

Lawyer Tom Ansell is sent by his firm to Salisbury. Their client, Canon Felix Slater, has a manuscript, a memoir written by his father, that he wants the law firm to hold until after his death. Although there are scandalous entries in the manuscript, Slater's passion for the past doesn't allow him to destroy the document.

Shortly after their initial meeting, Tom discovers Slater in his study, murdered with a flint spearhead from the area. Tom is the initial suspect, but soon released. His to-be fiancée arrives and together they search for the true killer.

Let's start with the positives. Gooden's style of writing is a delight. Both the text and the dialogue give a nod to the period. He is a very visual writer with wonderfully atmospheric descriptions.

The author does interesting things, such as incorporating the Tom's dreams and including a section mid-story relating the activities of each of the principal secondary characters the night after the murder. He has a subtle, dry humor. The characters are well-developed, interesting and distinctive. I enjoyed the plot with its many twists, but it was principally the characters that did it for me.

There were a few negative elements. There were details that seemed anachronistic and the way in which it ended was somewhat abrupt and disappointing.

I enjoy Gooden's Nick Revill series yet it was fun to have him write something different. I definitely enjoyed it, but would have liked it to be just a bit better.

In 1873, London attorney Thomas Ansell travels to Salisbury to pick up Canon Felix Slater's manuscript of his father's explicit memoir. George Slater was a compatriot of the great romance authors like Lord Byron, but his reputation was earned for his hedonistic ways especially womanizing.

After Thomas and Slater meet, someone murders the latter in his study; the murder weapon is a flint spearhead. The local police find Ansell near the corpse with his hands wet with blood. He knows he is prime suspect though the motive the cops assign to him is greed re stealing the manuscript. Not trusting the police to look elsewhere and needing to clear his name of scandal let alone murder suspicion, Ansell investigates.

This interesting Victorian amateur sleuth hooks the audience with an engaging whodunit and an unusual writing style that initially stuns the reader, but once adjusted seems apropos as it adds to the sense of time and place. Ansell is a fascinating protagonist who knows he is in over his head when he applies his legal skills to a murder mystery, but feels he has no choice. Although the ending seems too obvious, THE SALISBURY MANUSCRIPT is a fun late nineteenth century English mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Written with a Victorian sensibility, this compelling murder mystery uses the English town of Salisbury as a picaresque backdrop in tale of brotherly enmity where a mysterious manuscript threatens to shatter the reputation of a well-respected family if its elusive contents are ever made public. Thomas Ansell, lawyer for the London offices of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie is given the delicate task of traveling to Salisbury to secure the scandalous manuscript of George Slater.

Even though George had died many years ago, Felix Slater, George's devoutly religious son, who looks upon himself as the inheritor of tradition and a repository of all that's best in the Slater family, is of the opinion that his father's controversial writings should never see the light of day. Alex's instructions to the Firm are that it should be placed safely in their vaults and sealed up until Walter Slater, Felix's delicate nephew, can decide whether to read his grandfather's words, or whether to dispose of them unread.

Whatever Felix's feelings about his father - unease, embarrassment, even anger or disgust - he just can't bring himself to destroy what George Slater had committed to paper. As all of these issues cloud the mind of the poor Thomas Ansell, he eventually arrives in Salisbury to embark on an enterprise that he is sure has a presentiment of danger, even as the parting words of his dear sweetheart Helen tumble over and over in his mind: "You must take care of yourself my dear."

But it is a vision on the fog-shrouded Salisbury train platform and a silhouette at the platform's edge, a black figure creeping upon it and then another figure falling onto the tracks that most gives Thomas a feeling of doom. And then there's the appearance of a mysterious woman who bangs into him, assessing him by the faint light of the inn he is staying in. With a flamboyant appearance and maybe also a touch of foreignness about her, the beautiful woman raises a gloved hand towards a bunch of flowers attached to her coat collar, and almost inappropriately propositions him.

But Thomas still isn't quite prepared for what follows when he's caught between the priggish and particular Alex , lord and master of Venn House and his estranged brother, the irresponsible and self-indulgent Percy who is reportedly paying for a lifetime of indulgence while Northwood House, the Slater ancestral home, crumbles around his ears. Soon a portrait develops of two brothers: the one lean and austere, the other slack and self-indulgent. Felix's religious vocation passion for old artifacts and reverence for the Canon is contrasted with Percy's devotion to gambling and the turf. Neither brother is a fraudster but Thomas soon sees they are not quite how they'd been painted by others.

It is this animosity between both Alex and Percy that leads Thomas on an complicated investigation involving the discovery of a body at Venn House, a flint spear-head plunged into the nape of the neck, and the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Andrew North, one of the sextons at the cathedral church of St Mary who was rumored to have spent every spare moment looking for buried treasure or relics. It this murder and North's whereabouts, the two seemingly unconnected until the final chapters, when one the most incidental characters in the story is surprisingly married to an inexplicable theft.

Later, when the resourceful Helen arrives to assist Thomas after he is imprisoned on suspicion of murder, both hero and heroine embark on a wild ride that eventually involves a life and death struggle high atop of the spire of the Salisbury cathedral tower. Author Philip Gooden has an atmospheric style that takes full advantage of the mist-laden streets of Salisbury, but most impressive are his descriptions of the sepulchral gloom of the great Salisbury cathedral, the great pools of shadow from the scattered lamps and candles filling the space and seeming to flow down from the remote ceiling.

The author eventually ties his serpentine plot together through messages, the gossip of local townsfolk and meetings at the local Inn, where Thomas and Helen start digging into the past and end up putting themselves in danger by disturbing dust of centuries at Todd's Mound, an ancient burial ground near the Salisbury plains. A subplot involving a surprise revelation of the Slater family shakes everything up, but in the end it is Thomas who is left to test his real metal as a lawyer and as an investigator in a grand finale involving mistaken identities and brotherly animosity. Mike Leonard July 08.