An Unpardonable Crime (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "We owe respect to the living, Voltaire tells us in his Premiere Lettre sur Oedipe, but to the dead we owe only truth..." (more)
Key Phrases: ayez peur, shell grotto, Miss Carswall, Sir George, Henry Frant (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The prolific Taylor (the Roth trilogy, etc.) successfully channels Wilkie Collins in his latest effort, crafting a fluid, atmospheric period thriller. Thomas Shield is a young schoolmaster in Stoke Newington, just outside of London, whose charges include 10-year-old Edgar Allan Poe (as a child, the poet spent five years in England) and a pampered banker's son. The school's routine is disrupted when Shield runs across an eccentric character who displays an unhealthy interest in the two boys. His intervention brings Shield into closer contact with the banker's family and two desirable women. Uncomfortably occupying an uncertain position between master and servant, Shield juggles his instincts for self-preservation with his passions, a task made much harder when the severely mutilated corpse of the banker is discovered shortly after his business collapses. While the murder appears to give Shield a clear path to court the attractive widow, he is unable to ignore clues suggesting that the body is actually someone else's. The enigmatic nature of the protagonist a principled but often passive figure distances him from the reader. Although Taylor does an excellent job in portraying early 19th-century London and writes in a clear, consistent period style, the numerous foreboding references suggest a dramatic psychological twist or a surprising revelation concerning the killer's identity that does not materialize. The use of Poe as a character borders on gratuitous, despite the author's incorporation of biographical details; the youth is peripheral to the plot, and a fictional character could have been substituted with little discernible effect. While this effort is not as successful as Charles Palliser's superb, intricately plotted 19th-century thriller The Quincunx, it is a pleasurable read that will engross many.
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From The Washington Post

Nevermore

Sometimes audacity pays off. And you sure have to have a lot of chutzpah to attempt the kind of high-stakes literary heist that Andrew Taylor has masterminded in An Unpardonable Crime (Hyperion, $24.95). For starters, stickyfingers Taylor grabs hold of the 19th-century novel and runs. An Unpardonable Crime is neither an homage to nor an ironic modernist wink at the 19th-century novel, it is a 19th-century novel -- the gloomier sort Dickens wrote toward the end of his life, when Fate and Coincidence seemed less like acts of grace and more like taunts lobbed at humankind by the Great Puppeteer. Taylor's sweeping mystery tale is populated by innocents, eccentrics and evildoers whose lives twist, turn and overlap in a brilliantly intricate pattern.

At the dead center of the labyrinth sits Edgar Allan Poe. That's right: Taylor has kidnapped the Father of the Detective Story and plunked him down in this novel that recounts -- and has the nerve to solve -- two real-life mysteries that haunt Poe's life. First, there's the disappearance of his actor-father when Poe was a small child; second, there's Poe's own unexplained disappearance just before his death. (The Master of the Macabre vanished in Virginia and reappeared a week later in Baltimore, where he died, raving.) Given the risks of such bold biographical and novelistic thievery, anything less than a perfectly calibrated fictional performance by Taylor would set off the critical alarm bells. Luckily, in writing An Unpardonable Crime, he has also pulled off "the perfect crime." This is a stunning mystery: intelligent, ambitious in its construction, moving and, as befits its Poe-ish origins, genuinely frightening.

The story focuses primarily on the years 1819-20, and features as its hero and narrator a solitary young man named Thomas Shield. Shield's nerves are shot -- he was cited for bravery during the Napoleonic Wars but suffered for years afterward from what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Through the intercession of his dying aunt, Shield finds work as an assistant teacher at a boys' boarding school outside London where he encounters two pupils who look disturbingly like twins: One is named Charlie Frant, the other Edgar Allan. (Poe lived in England between the ages of 6 and 11 while his foster father, John Allan, struggled to set up a London branch of his business.) Shield is drawn into the society of the turbulent Frant family, serving as a tutor to Charlie and his close friend Edgar during school holidays. When Charlie's beautiful mother is left widowed upon the ghastly death of her husband, Shield foolishly hopes to become a more permanent fixture in the Frant circle. Slowly, he realizes that he's been flattered above his station for a purpose.

That's just a dip into this maelstrom of a tale that features duplicitous servants, femmes fatale, ancestral piles, stolen jewels, missing fingers and sub-subplots about war profiteering in the States, shady bank dealings and unholy loves. Certainly some of the huge pleasure of reading An Unpardonable Crime derives from clutching at all the literary allusions flying about. Taylor nods to Poe's trademark terrors -- live burials, pits, sinister doubles -- but there are also strains of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the Gothic gloom of all three Brontë sisters and, as noted, Dickens's later, darker masterpieces. An Unpardonable Crime is much more, however, than the sum of its "borrowed" parts. This is a mystery that creates its own vividly unsettling world. The odd mood of that world stays with a reader long after all the hidden identities have been unmasked and all the crypt doors have been fastened tight.

Triple-Decker Thrills

John Dunning's erudite "Bookman" series does most of its traveling back in time via the musty old volumes that its hero, Cliff Janeway, scouts for his rare book business. In The Bookman's Promise (Scribner, $25), Janeway has just bought himself a doozy of an armchair time-travel aid: He's paid close to $30,000 at auction for a three-decker edition of Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, by the Victorian explorer and notorious man of letters Richard Burton. Janeway should be nestling in to enjoy his luxurious read, but he makes the mistake of accepting an invitation to go on National Public Radio to talk about rare books in general and the Burton book in particular. Shortly thereafter, an elderly woman named Josephine Gallant turns up at his store. ("She was not just old, she was a human redwood.") Gallant claims that Janeway's prize acquisition was part of a Burton collection pillaged from her grandfather's library in 1906. Most lesser humans would dismiss the old gal's claims -- especially since she passes away hours after the meeting. But Janeway is an old-fashioned man of honor, and his determination to track down the provenance of the Burton volumes intensifies when a friend safeguarding the literary treasure is murdered.

The Bookman's Promise itself is a volume that fans of the "Bookman" series will be delighted to add to their crime libraries. In addition to serving up the familiar trademarks of this series -- Janeway's rueful worldview and the enlightening tidbits about rare books scattered throughout the story -- the novel ambitiously conjures up a lost journal about Burton's rumored espionage work in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. As gilding on the pages here, Janeway even finds romance in this latest outing -- with a woman who can quote James M. Cain, no less!

In a Good Cause

Rebecca Pawel set the mystery world agog last year with her debut historical novel, Death of a Nationalist, which takes place in Madrid immediately after the Spanish Civil War. That Pawel was only 25 years old and still could offer such a nuanced understanding of the politics and social conventions of the times was one cause for wonder. The other marvel was the novel's resistance to sentimentality: The good characters behave in spectacularly foolish and sometimes cowardly ways. Moreover, Pawel's main character, Carlos Tejada Alonso y Léon, is a sergeant in the Guardia Civil and a dedicated supporter of the conservative Catholic Franquista cause. Given the judgment of history, a Republican rather than a Nationalist would have been a more politically congenial choice for a hero. The courage of imagination that Pawel demonstrated throughout that first novel stoked critical anticipation for a sequel.

Well, here it is. Law of Return (Soho, $24) is set in the university city of Salamanca, where Tejada, now a lieutenant, has been transferred for a tour of duty. Coincidentally, Salamanca is also the city where Elena Fernandez, Tejada's left-leaning love interest, has moved to be with her aged parents. (She's particularly protective of her father, a former classics professor and supporter of Miguel de Unamuno, the great poet who was ousted from his post as rector of the University of Salamanca in 1936 because of his dissenting political views.) To put it mildly, Elena and Tejada are stationed in opposite trenches when it comes to politics; that Pawel has caved in and allowed these two starcrossed lovers to reach an accord is both satisfying and disappointing, since that happy turn of events signals that Law of Return is less morally complicated than its predecessor.

Still, there's plenty to admire in this mystery that intertwines plots about the disappearance of a paroled political prisoner and the clandestine efforts of Elena's father to smuggle a Jewish colleague out of occupied France. Elena takes center stage in this latter tale of wartime suspense, since she has the freedom of movement that her father lacks. (As a known dissident, he must report in to Tejada for weekly police checks.) The "law of return" of the novel's title alludes to a 1924 ruling permitting Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain to reclaim their Spanish citizenship. The title also refers to the reunion of Tejada and Elena, whose future happiness will rest on a scrupulous avoidance of the hotbed issues of religion and politics.

The Missing

What's left to discuss, then, is the weather, and weather -- gray, chilly, wet -- is a brooding element in Karin Fossum's police procedural Don't Look Back (Harcourt, $23), which has been translated from the Norwegian by Felicity David. Fossum's novels starring Inspector Konrad Sejer have been critically acclaimed throughout Europe, and it's easy to see why. Sejer is one of those deadpan police philosopher types the Northern climes generate. (Think of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or Maj Sowall's and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck.) A widower whose loneliness is eased by his dog and drink, Sejer lives for his work and for the occasional visits of his daughter and small grandson.

Don't Look Back toys with the terrible theme of the many ways a parent can lose a beloved child. It opens with the disappearance of a little girl in an isolated Norwegian village. As Sejer and his team desperately try to track down the child, readers are told that "their unease was growing steadily, like a dead spot in the chest where the blood refused to flow." Yet, even as that storyline swerves away from its dread resolution, another horror presents itself. The unclothed corpse of a teenaged girl -- a popular babysitter in the village -- is discovered at the edge of a mountain lake. Annie Holland was tall, muscular and aloof; in short, not the kind of girl one would think of as vulnerable to attack. As Sejer delves into Annie's background, the puzzles multiply. Every man in Annie's life, Sejer learns, is hiding sins; but then Annie turns out to have been harboring some grim secrets, too.

Echo Effect

Another spring, another Spenser novel. Bad Business (Putnam, $24.95), by Robert B. Parker, is kind of a screwball hard-boiled. A beautiful woman (again) walks into Spenser's Boston office and hires him to gather evidence against her two-timing husband in preparation for the divorce she's about to request. As Spenser begins tailing the husband, he realizes that another private investigator is tailing him. So he begins tailing the tail and unearths a thin layer of subplots about open marriages, pop-psychologist conmen and sex clubs in suburbia.

Anyone (like me) still addictively reading the Spenser books at this diminished moment in the series's long history knows that expectations must be lowered. There's neither suspense nor much provocative social commentary in Bad Business, but every so often there are echoes of Spenser's saucy humor and razzmatazz dialogue. When Marlene Rowley, the beautiful client, walks into Spenser's office, he describes her thus:

"She was good-looking in kind of an old-fashioned way. Sort of womanly. Before personal trainers, and StairMasters. . . . Her reddish blond hair was long and thoroughly sprayed. . . . Her mouth was kind of thin and her eyes were small. I imagined cheating on her." Okay, I said "echoes."

Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1 edition (March 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401301029
• ISBN-13: 978-1401301026
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,036,078 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fantastic read, March 1, 2004

By	tregatt (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This is all that I' going to "say" about the plot of "An Unpardonable Crime:" that it is set in 1819, and that it opens with our narrator, Thomas Shields, (a young man of education and who has managed to survive the peninsula war, but who has little money and fewer expectations), explaining how he managed to secure a job as an under usher (a sort of tutor) at the Reverend Mr. Bransby's school, and how he came to become so intimately involved in the affairs of the Wavenhoe, Frants and Carswall families, death, greed and murder. To say more, would only detract from the overall enjoyment for anyone who's not yet read this skillfully crafted novel. Enough to say that if you enjoy reading Victorian-era suspenseful novels (like those written by Wilkie Collins, for example), you're bound to enjoy "An Unpardonable Crime." As with many of the novels of similar genre, Andrew Taylor has successfully coloured his novel with a dark and almost menacing atmosphere, added enough intriguing and suspenseful plot twists, and peopled it with characters that both engaged and filled me with loathing. In other words, this was a riveting read. Andrew Taylor did a fantastic job of making England of the early 19th century real and vivid. "An Unpardonable Crime" won the CWA Historical Dagger for 2003, and it definitely deserves the award. I picked up the book after dinner, and had to force myself to put the novel down and go to bed -- it was that "unputdownable!" All in all, a rousing 5 stars!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb epic historical mystery, February 25, 2004

By	Larry Gandle (Tampa, Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are certain historical novels that are so large and all encompassing that they not only evoke a time and place but truly place the reader realistically in its midst. Immediately coming to mind are the Dickens books that were contemporary when they were written but are considered historical to the present readers. A contemporary book such as THE QUINCUNX by Charles Palliser (who also wrote a testimonial for this work) also comes to mind. Andrew Taylor admirably succeeds in recreating both London and the British countryside of 1819 and peoples the book with enough shadowy and colorful characters to make the trip very worthwhile.
The narrative we are reading is that of Thomas Shield, a tutor at a private school of Stoke Newington. He comes across a child named Charles Frant who is a targeted by the other students as a scapegoat until another young man appears by the name of Edgar Allen. Edgar, by fighting the other students wins a certain amount of respect for himself and for Charles, as well. It is soon thereafter that while walking in the neighborhood, Thomas witnesses an inebriated man accosting the two boys. He rescues them from the situation and a grateful Henry Frant, father of Charles invites Thomas to come to the house as a tutor. So begins the long tale of Thomas' intertwined relationships with this household.
Andrew Taylor is a unique author of many talents. This very large epic novel follows close on the heels of the wonderful Roth trilogy. There is much good in this current work. The strength of any historical novel is the ability of the author to bring the era to life with a compelling and intriguing story. With that he readily succeeds. A problem, however, is that he takes so darn long to get through it. When we finally reach the end, the exposition must be extremely lengthy and complex. THE AMERICAN BOY has won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger for historical mysteries. It is an award well deserved.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Edgar Allen Poe revisited, April 7, 2004

By	Rebecca Brown "rebeccasreads" (Clallam Bay, WA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In Andrew Taylor's atmospheric feast, AN UNPARDONABLE CRIME, a man is found brutally murdered on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stew of the city's notorious Seven Dials district. A deathbed vigil ends in theft, & a beautiful heiress flirts with the wrong class of people.

What connects these events? A school master & an American boy, Edgar Allen (Poe), brought to England by his foster father & sent to a boarding school in the sleepy village of Stoke Newington.

It is 1819 - Britain & America have at last quit fighting. The Regency Period is in high swing & the traffic of people & money between the countries is flowing fast. Into this new world where social classes are re-forming, a young teacher & the boys in his care, boys who could almost be twins, are drawn into a maelstrom of intrigue, murder & love.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends AN UNPARDONABLE CRIME for those who relish historical fiction, based on journals & research. It will be right up your cobblestoned alley.