An Unpardonable Crime (Hardcover)

by Andrew Taylor (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's Book World/washingtonpost.com

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