Frank Tallis – Mortal Mischief (2005)

Preamble

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Review

As one of the extraordinary sidekick series I’ve written about before, I watched Vienna Blood when it first broadcast and so the characters here feel quite comfy and familiar: Oskar and Max, the Liebermann family more broadly, and the psychiatric community of medics in turn-of-the-century Vienna. So, I was surprised to learn that this book was 20 years old. (But TV adaptation sometimes really can take an age, I suppose.)

I enjoyed coming back to this after enough time had passed that I couldn’t quite remember all of the specifics, although I knew the broad outlines and some of the main characters’ arcs. The setting is well drawn, and the two main sleuths complement each other well. Their friendship feels genuine and heart-felt, even if its origins are slightly hazy. (It largely seems to revolve around music, about which I have less knowledge and enthusiasm than the characters.)

Tallis is established in the field of psychology, and so he is effective both at conjuring up the history of science elements of the novel as well as working through the psychological analyses of his characters, either through Max’s voice or through the plotting and narration itself. Viennese culture, both the political world of policing and the medical world of psychiatry, are well drawn. There are the petty and the not-so-petty disagreements; the official partner of an extraordinary sidekick always ends up being something of an outsider in their department precisely because of these unusual methods, and in any historical fiction featuring the medical profession there is often much to criticise about past methods.

As the series goes on, it explores in more detail the anti-Semitic nature of that culture at the start of the twentieth century, but that is present here too as a historical fact and a feature of Max’s ‘outsider’ status, both in his field and in Oskar’s world of policing. This lends the ‘extraordinary sidekick’ structure some added tension. There is always a friction between them and the ‘official police’, which the primary contact point (Oskar, in this case) tries to mediate. Sometimes this is exacerbated by a characteristic of the sidekick themselves, for example historical fiction featuring extraordinary female sidekicks working with the police, but the undercurrent of repression that is bubbling towards the surface in fin-de-siècle Vienna is really of another order of magnitude given our knowledge of what is to come. For example, Freud, who features as a side character in the series, himself fled into exile in 1938.

As to the crime itself, the suspect pool revolves around a locked room mystery and a cast of misfits drawn to the murdered medium (or actress, as the case turns out to be). Both the autopsies in the book and the ultimate solution have a strong air of CSI about them (check out the ‘Burden of Proof’ episode…), but I quite like that, the novel as a whole teetering on the modern. I will look forward to reading the others as familiar interludes.

See also

These lists capture other 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!

• Ripper Street (TV series)
• The Black Drop (Leonora Nattrass)
• The Alienist (Caleb Carr)

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Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!