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Amazon.co.uk Review
In The Fiend in Human, Edmund Whitty, a dissolute journalist, writes columns on grisly crimes and the latest public hangings for The Falcon, a muckraking tabloid in Victorian London. Whitty is addicted to a variety of potions: gin, snuff, laudanum and Acker's Chlorodine (opium, marijuana and cocaine in alcohol). His latest series focuses on William Ryan, whom he has dubbed Chokee Bill: murderer of five women, lover of the stately Mrs Marlowe and presently an inmate in Coldbath Fields prison awaiting his appointment with the noose. But when murders continue in Chokee Bill's signature style, Whitty must return to the streets to investigate.
A successful dramatist (Billy Bishop Goes to War), John MacLachlan Gray fills his novel with waggish Victorian-era dialogue, as in the exchange between Whitty and his editor:
"You make an appalling sight, Edmund. Consumptive and syphilitic at the same time."A pair of Oxford swells also plays an important role in this finely built novel, as well as a family from the lower orders that helps Whitty in his investigations of the slippery Ryan. Gray's depictions of seedy, contaminated London are enough to make the reader itch. Altogether, Gray has written a fine thriller that explores the power and limits of the press, as well as the depths of the human beast. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca
"In actual fact I have been contemplating the water cure--nothing like it to tone the system."
"Water would be a novelty in your system, I should think."
"London water is notorious. Gives you typhus."
"You'll use any excuse to deteriorate."
"Deterioration is relative. We all deteriorate."
"Not with your enthusiasm."
Product Description
'In the midst of life we are in death.' London in the early 1850s. The squalid underbelly of the Victorian slums coexist in uneasy partnership with the specious glamour of the privileged, dandified West End, each feeding off the other in an endless circle of vice, exploitation and death. London is the world's capital city of murder, its chief attraction the public execution of killers at Newgate. Edmund Whitty is a correspondent on the Falcon, reporting on the underworld. He is a loser, pursued by creditors and dangerously addicted to alcohol, laudanum and cocaine. He is openly scornful of the balladeers, or patterers, who write up the life of the condemned in doggerel verses even further divorced from truth than his own, embroidered newspaper reports. Whitty reaches his nadir when he is kidnapped and spirited off to the slums of St Giles. His kidnapper is Mr. Owler, a balladeer he has traduced in one of his columns. But instead of revenge Owler wishes them to form an unlikely partnership. The subject of Owler's latest ballad is the serial killer, William Garvey, shortly to hang for his crimes. Garvey denies his guilt, but Owler feels by securing access to the criminal he will extract the man's true confession, beat his competitors to the story and thus make his fortune. He wants Whitty to lend validation to his research. They are about to embark on a strange journey through the darkness of Victorian London where truth and fiction are often indistinguishable, a condemned man's life is at stake and savage, copycat murders continue despite his incarceration.
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65% buy the item featured on this page: The Fiend in Human |
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