Tag: 19th century

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

It’s 1869 and Japan has entered the Meiji era. The Tokugawa shogunate has fallen and the Emperor Meiji has been restored to the throne. After centuries of isolation, Japan is finally opening up to foreign trade and undergoing social, industrial and military reform. In Tokyo, a group of corrupt rasotsu (policemen) have found ways to exploit this period of change and upheaval for their own gain. With the arrival of two Chief Inspectors from the Imperial Prosecuting Office, Kawaji and Kazuki, it seems that the rasotsu will be forced to mend their ways – although the two men have other things to occupy their time as well as dealing with corruption.

With a number of bizarre murders taking place around Tokyo, Kazuki and Kawaji (based on a real person who is considered the founder of Japan’s modern police system) engage in a friendly competition to see who can solve the crimes first. A separate chapter is devoted to each case, which at first seem to be unrelated, making the book feel almost like a collection of short stories. There are five cases for the two detectives to solve, with the help of Esmeralda, a young Frenchwoman from a family of executioners whom Kazuki has brought to Japan along with that most deadly of French weapons: the guillotine. Despite the title, the guillotine is not necessarily used to carry out all of the murders in the book, but it represents the changes that Japan is experiencing as the country becomes exposed to modern, western influence. It also provides a reason for Esmeralda’s presence in Tokyo, which is important as she has a significant role to play in the solving of the mysteries.

The Meiji Guillotine Murders was first published in 1979 and is one of several Japanese crime novels that have recently been made available in English by Pushkin Press. However, although I’ve loved some of the others, I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much. Bryan Karetnyk’s translation is clear and readable (I’m already familiar with his work through some of his other translated novels), but I had problems with other aspects of the book. I struggled with the number of characters, particularly as so few of them have clearly defined personalities and with more and more of them being introduced with each new case the detectives investigate. My lack of engagement with the characters made it difficult for me to concentrate on following the plot, which is important as all of the separate cases are quite complex and you do need to be paying attention! I persevered and was rewarded with the final section of the book where, after some surprising twists and turns, everything is tied together perfectly.

I did like the historical setting of the book and felt I was learning a lot about Japan during the Meiji era. At times it seemed more like historical fiction than a murder mystery, which was fine with me, but I think someone picking the book up expecting a more traditional crime novel may be surprised by the amount of historical detail. It’s an interesting, unusual book, and although I’m not sure whether I would read any more by Yamada, I do hope more of them are translated into English for those readers who loved this one. I’m enjoying discovering Japanese crime authors through Pushkin and so far my favourites have been Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 7/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Book 24/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

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In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about two sisters, Diamonds and Toads, a fairy rewards the good sister with the ability to spit gold and punishes the bad sister with the curse of spitting toads. This is the premise at the heart of Carmella Lowkis’ new novel, Spitting Gold, a tale of two very different sisters living in 19th century Paris.

It’s 1866 and Baroness Sylvie Devereux has settled into a respectable married life, but a visit from her younger sister, Charlotte Mothe, threatens to ruin both her marriage and her reputation. For several years, Sylvie and Charlotte had worked together as spiritualists, conning grieving victims out of large sums of money, but Sylvie has promised her husband that those days are behind her and her sister is no longer part of her life. Now, though, Charlotte is begging Sylvie to join her for one last job and Sylvie finds it impossible to refuse, knowing that Charlotte needs the money to pay their father’s medical bills.

Several members of the wealthy de Jacquinot family believe they are being haunted by the spirit of a great-aunt, who was brutally murdered during the French Revolution, leaving behind a hidden treasure. The Mothe sisters agree to help lay the ghost to rest and begin to use every trick and deception at their disposal to convince the family that they are making contact with the spirit. Everything seems to be going well, until the ghost appears to start targeting the sisters themselves. Is the de Jacquinot house really haunted or is there another explanation for what is happening?

There seems to be a current trend for historical novels about mediums and séances; I can think of several I’ve read just in the last year or so, including Lucy Barker’s The Other Side of Mrs Wood and Ambrose Parry’s Voices of the Dead. What makes this one different is the structure and the idea of using two sisters to give alternate views of the same story – the first half of the book is narrated by Sylvie and the second half by Charlotte. I’m not sure how well this worked for me; it was interesting to see things from two such different perspectives, but by the time Charlotte’s narrative began I had become so absorbed in Sylvie’s story I struggled to adjust to a change of narrator.

Apart from the references to the French Revolution, I felt that the book lacked the strong sense of time and place I prefer and at times I even forgot that I was reading a story set in 19th century Paris and not Victorian London. I did love the good sister/bad sister theme, though – while at first it seems obvious that Sylvie is the good one and Charlotte the bad, as the novel continues we learn that things are not that simple and that we shouldn’t rely on just one point of view to give us the full picture. As a debut novel it was quite entertaining, with some interesting twists; I’m not sure whether I’ll read more books by Carmella Lowkis, but I could be tempted!

Thanks to Doubleday for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 19/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Household by Stacey Halls

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Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush, London, was a home for ‘fallen women’ founded in 1846 by Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts. Their vision was to provide a safe place for young women to rehabilitate after serving prison sentences or working on the streets as prostitutes. At Urania Cottage they would receive an education and the opportunity to train as domestic servants, enabling them to start new, more respectable lives overseas. In her latest novel, The Household, Stacey Halls imagines the stories of some of these women.

During the period covered in the novel, there are many young women staying at Urania Cottage, but Halls chooses to focus on two of them. One is Martha who, while trying to rebuild her own life at the cottage, is also worrying about her sister, Emily, who has disappeared. As Martha grows more desperate about Emily, she is driven to make a decision she may later regret. The other is Josephine, who had expected a close friend to accompany her to Urania Cottage. When the friend never arrives, Josephine must decide whether to continue participating in the scheme or leave in search of happiness elsewhere.

Dickens himself is mentioned now and then but always stays in the background, never becoming an actual character in the novel. Angela Burdett-Coutts, on the other hand, has a much larger role. We meet Angela as a woman in her early thirties who several years earlier inherited a fortune from her banker grandfather, making her one of England’s wealthiest people. She is becoming known as a philanthropist and Urania Cottage is one of her first big projects.

Angela’s privileged lifestyle means she struggles to truly understand the needs of the women at the cottage, but she and Dickens both enter into the project with the best intentions. However, despite Angela’s wealth and position she still has problems of her own to deal with – such as being stalked by Richard Dunn. She had thought she was safe from Dunn when he was sent to prison for four years, but now he’s been released early and is on her trail again. As I read, I wondered whether this was a fictitious storyline, but I looked it up and found that, yes, Richard Dunn was a real person and did obsessively pursue Angela Burdett-Coutts as described in the book. It seems that other parts of the novel I had assumed were invented were also based on historical fact; after finishing the book I was interested to learn that many of the incidents described as happening at Urania Cottage were taken from Dickens’ letters to Angela and even inspired his own David Copperfield.

The Household is fascinating in many ways, yet it’s probably my least favourite of Stacey Halls’ books. The separate stories of Angela, Josephine and Martha never quite blend together properly and give the novel a disjointed feel. I found the first half very slow and although there’s a twist towards the end that I hadn’t seen coming, it happens too late to really change the way I felt about the book overall. Still, I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to learn about life at Urania Cottage and will look forward to whatever Stacey Halls writes next.

Thanks to Manilla Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 16/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

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When I saw this year’s longlist for the Walter Scott Prize, one of the books I was most interested in reading was The Fraud. I haven’t read any of Zadie Smith’s other books, but the subject and setting of this one sounded appealing to me.

At the heart of the novel is a real-life court case in which a man many believe to be Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from London, claims to be Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to a baronetcy thought to have died in a shipwreck in 1854. The ‘Claimant’, as he becomes known, is immediately identified as Roger by his mother, but the rest of the Tichborne family insist that he’s an imposter. The dispute goes on for several years and captures the imagination of the public, with people travelling for miles to come and watch the case play out in court. Two of the people following the proceedings with interest are Sarah Ainsworth and Eliza Touchet, who are central characters in Smith’s novel.

Eliza Touchet is a cousin by marriage of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and has lived with him as his housekeeper – and occasional lover – since the 1830s, while also growing close to his first wife, Frances. By the time of the Tichborne trial several decades later, William has been widowed and married again, this time to Sarah, his former maid. Sarah is obsessed with the Tichbornes and convinced that the Claimant is telling the truth and it is she who persuades Eliza to accompany her to court. Here Eliza finds herself drawn not to the supposed Sir Roger, but to one of the key witnesses – Andrew Bogle, an elderly black man who was Roger’s uncle’s servant and is one of the few people to speak up in support of the Claimant.

The novel moves backwards and forwards in time between the 1830s and 1870s, with the story unfolding through a series of very short chapters, sometimes only a page or two long. I wasn’t really a fan of this structure, as it made it difficult to become fully immersed and keep track of what was happening. And there’s a lot happening! As well as the coverage of the Tichborne trial, there’s a long digression into the early life of Andrew Bogle as a slave on a plantation in Jamaica, discussions of the Victorian literary scene and domestic details of life in the Ainsworth household. There were too many separate storylines for one book and some of them didn’t really seem to lead anywhere or integrate with the others. Having said that, I still found things to enjoy and my overall feelings about the book are probably slightly more positive than negative!

Most of the people who appear in The Fraud really existed, although not necessarily as Zadie Smith describes them. Eliza Touchet, for example, was a real person but died much earlier than she does in the novel and wouldn’t have been around by the time of the Tichborne case, so while there’s a lot to learn from this book it’s worth remembering that it’s not all factually correct. I did find it interesting to read about the life and work of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose books were hugely popular at the time – particularly Jack Sheppard, one of the ‘Newgate novels’ Claire Harman discusses in her true crime book, Murder by the Book – but have largely been forgotten today. Smith explores Ainsworth’s rivalry with Charles Dickens, as well as allegations that he stole some of the ideas for his novels from his illustrator, George Cruikshank. Is it just the Tichborne Claimant who is the ‘fraud’ of the title or could it also be Ainsworth himself?

Although there were parts of The Fraud that I enjoyed, I think there was really enough material here for two or three books and I ended up feeling overwhelmed. Maybe a different Zadie Smith book would have been a better starting point for me after all.

Book 15/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Clairmont by Lesley McDowell

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I have read several novels about the Romantic poets and their social circle, including Jude Morgan’s Passion and Guinevere Glasfurd’s The Year Without Summer, but Claire Clairmont has always seemed a shadowy character, who hasn’t come to life as strongly as other women such as Mary Shelley or Lady Caroline Lamb. This new novel by Lesley McDowell changes that by giving Claire a voice and placing her at the forefront of her own story.

Clairmont follows Claire throughout three different periods of her life, beginning in 1816 when she accompanies her stepsister Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) to Geneva. Claire, Mary and Mary’s married lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she already has a baby son, are renting a house by the lake, while Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is staying at the nearby Villa Diodati with his doctor, John Polidori. Claire is pregnant with Byron’s child, but it’s becoming clear that he now views her as an inconvenience and would prefer it if the child was never born.

The Geneva episode taking place in 1816, the ‘year without a summer’ which followed a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, is the part of Claire’s life most people will be familiar with (if they’re familiar with her at all). It was during their stay at the Villa Diodati that Mary began to write her famous novel Frankenstein, and it’s through her own relationships with Byron and the Shelleys that Claire has gained historical significance. In addition, this novel also follows Claire during her time working as a governess in Russia in 1825 and later when she settles in Paris in the 1840s, and we gradually begin to see how those events of 1816 have impacted the rest of her life.

There were things that I liked about this book and things that I didn’t (more of the latter than the former, unfortunately). To start with a positive, I appreciated having the opportunity to learn more about Claire Clairmont, having previously known very little about her beyond her involvement with the Romantic poets. I had no idea what she did or where she went later in life, so I found that interesting. The story is not told in chronological order, but moves back and forth in time, with a Russia chapter followed by a Paris one then back to Geneva again, which I thought was quite confusing, particularly as the gaps between the timelines aren’t adequately filled in and no backstory is given for the characters prior to 1816. It felt as though half of the story was missing and it made it difficult to become fully immersed.

The writing is beautiful and dreamlike and at times reminded me of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (especially since, like the O’Farrell novel where Shakespeare is never referred to by name, here Byron is always referred to by his nickname, Albe, and never Byron). However, sometimes beautiful writing isn’t enough and I didn’t get on very well with Hamnet so maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t get on with this book either. The constant jumping around in time and the vagueness of the plot made it hard for me to really get to know Claire and understand her actions. Although I had a lot of sympathy for her because of the terrible way Byron treated her during and after her pregnancy (which has been well documented, including in his own letters), I had no idea what attracted her to him in the first place or how their relationship had reached this point, because none of that is explained or touched upon. Throughout the book, we are continually being dropped into situations that don’t make much sense without being given the full context.

Don’t let me put you off this book if you want to try it – there are plenty of other books I didn’t care for that other people have loved! This will probably be a good read for the right reader; it just wasn’t for me.

Thanks to Headline for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 7/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Bone Hunters by Joanne Burn

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The cliffs and beaches of Lyme Regis on the south coast of England are famous for their fossils, particularly the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles, some of which were discovered in the 19th century by the fossil collector and scientist, Mary Anning. In her new novel The Bone Hunters, Joanne Burn takes inspiration from Anning’s life and work to create the fictional story of another female fossil hunter, Ada Winters.

Ada is twenty-four years old when her story begins in 1824. Since her father’s death, she and her mother have been struggling to pay the rent and are at risk of losing their little cottage by the sea. Much to her mother’s frustration, Ada is reluctant to look for a job, instead spending her days wandering on the beach and insisting that the collection of bones and fossils she is acquiring will one day make their fortune. Ada receives a setback when her request to join the Geological Society of London is rejected, but her disappointment turns to excitement when she discovers what she believes to be the remains of a previously unidentified species.

When Ada meets another geologist, Dr Edwin Moyle, by the cliffs one day, she must decide whether to trust him with what she has found. Edwin’s support means she will be more likely to be taken seriously when she presents her discovery to the Society, but what if he tries to claim the skeleton for himself? Having come so close to achieving her dream, Ada is determined not to let anyone take it away from her!

The Bone Hunters is a beautifully written novel. I loved the descriptions of the landscape – the beach, the harbour, the cliffs of Black Ven with their ‘dark, forbidding crag face looming high above’ – and the town itself. The relationship between the people of Lyme and their natural environment is something that comes up again and again throughout the book: the dangers of landslides that can happen without warning; the severe flooding that can destroy homes and take lives. It’s one of those novels where the geographical setting takes on as much importance as the characters and the plot.

As I read, it was difficult not to make comparisons with Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier’s novel about Mary Anning, but I think I enjoyed this one more. Inventing a character based on Anning rather than writing about Anning herself allowed Joanne Burn to bring more drama into the story and to introduce other fictional characters and storylines. I particularly liked Josiah and Annie Fountain, an elderly couple who run a bookshop together and have taken Ada under their wing, and Isaac, a young man who has come to Lyme to collect local myths and legends. Ada herself frustrated me because of her single-mindedness and selfishness – I felt sorry for her mother who was making herself ill washing fleeces in a factory all day while Ada refused to go to work – but at the same time I could admire her ambition and determination as a woman trying to make a name for herself in a male-dominated field. As for Edwin, part of the story is written from his point of view which adds an extra angle of interest, but I won’t tell you whether he turns out to be hero or villain!

Joanne Burn is a new author for me. I haven’t read either of her previous novels, but I do now want to read The Hemlock Cure, based on the real life story of the village of Eyam during the Great Plague.

Thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 5/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Spendthrift and the Swallow by Ambrose Parry

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I loved the first four novels in Ambrose Parry’s Raven and Fisher mystery series and although there doesn’t currently seem to be any news of a fifth, I was pleased to come across this digital short story available free for Kindle. It fits into the series chronologically between the third and fourth books but if you come to it late, as I did, it doesn’t matter at all as it works as a standalone story.

Ambrose Parry is a pseudonym used by the crime author Chris Brookmyre and his wife Dr Marisa Haetzman, a consultant anaesthetist. Marisa’s knowledge is crucial to the series, which is set against the backdrop of the medical world of 19th century Edinburgh. Our two main characters are Dr Will Raven, assistant to the renowned Scottish obstetrician Dr James Simpson, and Sarah Fisher, who also assists at Simpson’s clinic but is struggling to find a way to achieve her own dream of becoming a doctor. Each book in the series features a mystery to be solved, as well as details of Victorian medical procedures and treatments.

The Spendthrift and the Swallow is only 52 pages long, including a preview for Voices of the Dead, and can easily be read in about twenty minutes. The story is set in January 1853 and we follow Will and Sarah as they investigate the death of one of Dr Simpson’s patients, Cora Carlton, the wife of an entrepreneur. The circumstances of Cora’s sudden death could raise questions over the doctor’s medical abilities, so Will and Sarah hope to uncover the truth quickly enough to save his reputation. Meanwhile, Simpson has begun experimenting with the increasingly popular science of mesmerism and places a loud and difficult patient under hypnosis with startling results. I was interested to read in the author’s note at the end of the book that both of these incidents were based on real historical cases.

If you’re new to the Raven and Fisher books, reading this story first wouldn’t be a problem as it doesn’t really spoil anything from the main series and it’s a satisfying mystery in its own right. However, it’s too short for any character development or any background information to help you understand the relationship between Sarah and Will and what has happened to them up to this point. My recommendation is to start with the first full-length novel, The Way of all Flesh. For existing Parry readers, though, this is an entertaining little book and provides an introduction to the mesmerism storyline that will play such a big part in Voices of the Dead.

Book 3/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024