MRC Kasasian – The Mangle Street Murders (2013)

Preamble

As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I’ve a series of reviews on the theme. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover detective films and TV series too! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Or you can take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: support on Kickstarter or preorder now!

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See also

These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• JC Briggs’ Charles Dickens Investigations series
• The Lady Killers podcast by Lucy Worsley
• Murder by the Book by Claire Harman

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Review (3.5 out of 5)

I picked up one of the books in this Gower Street Detective series a while ago now (Libby tells me it was at the very end of 2022), read 50 pages or so, and then put it away again. I didn’t quite gel with Sidney Grice, or his ward-cum-Watson, March Middleton, and I was busy with work and planning the Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project of 2023. But I saw this recommended when I was placing yet another hold for The Village of Eight Graves, and as it was the first book in the series, I thought I would start again.

The blurbs suggest humour in the Jasper Fforde style, but I’m not sure that’s quite accurate. (I would strongly recommend people pick up Fforde’s Thursday Next series, though!) Instead, the novel relies on little cruelties exchanged back and forth for its main source of humour.

The beginning consultation felt rather similar to the book I’d started previously, so I had to double-check that I hadn’t started in the wrong place a second time. I still don’t like Sidney Grice, I’m afraid. That is very much the intended reaction, I think: he is generally a sexist, unsympathetic, boorish gold-digger with unusual enthusiasms for both empire and capital punishment. He has also lost one eye and a pronounced limp, the former of which Kasasian plays largely for laughs, and a strident ethical commitment to vegetarianism/veganism that might surprise some readers. (Advocates of vegetarianism included Percy Bysshe Shelley and Leo Tolstoy, among other well-known figures, and the first vegetarian society was founded in the UK in the 1840s.)

What I did find slightly more compelling about Grice is the undermining hints of fallibility in the detective. He gets the initial criminal solution wrong, mostly, although not quite wrong enough for it to have any consequences, and we are led to join March in questioning his potential for error by early hints, such as the reference to how Grice nearly foiled an Archduke’s kidnapping. I should like to see him fail more.

It is in March that we are supposed to be more interested, however. Her character follows some of the typical tropes of a neo-Victorian female lead. She has had the eminently practical, if unconventional, middle class upbringing that seems necessary to sharing her new guardian’s line of work, and although she initially presents vaguely sympathetically, as an orphan with a dead solider fiancé and an interest in justice sparked by her colonial experiences, she also brings with her the usual markers of a thoroughly modern miss: drinking, smoking, an independent streak illustrated by her attendance at an all-female club, and the financial wherewithal to mislead the mercenary Grice.

We are left to wonder, early on, whether this will be a world with Holmes in it (as in my own neo-Victorian collection!), but the novel sets Grice up as the inspiration for Holmes, with a young medic named Dr Conan Doyle attending to March’s injured ankle partway through the novel. Some details of her father’s life given earlier on will ring bells for any reader, as probably will some initial details of the central crime. That crime itself proves somewhat underwhelming perhaps in part because of how overwrought it becomes as the investigation unravels the truth behind an apparent miscarriage of justice precipitated by Grice. The blurb signals that excesses of violence lie within, through its reference to Spring-Heeled Jack, but there is no genuine sensation of menace in the book. Instead, the primary tension is whether March or Grice will prove the better judge of character. I would say that that contest emerges a draw. I’ll gladly read the subsequent novels to see how this develops, but probably only as and when I find a quiet moment without anything else on my agenda.

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MRC Kasasian’s The Mangle Street Murders was not part of my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project of 2023, but a holiday read while I was finishing proofs of my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies and wanted to keep to the neo-Victorian vibe! Take a look at that new collection on Kickstarter or preorder now!