Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell
Published by Mulholland Books on May 7, 2013
If you took No Country For Old Men (or at least the movie, I haven't read the book), Ripper Street (the British TV show...I only saw one episode but it seemed like turn-of-the-century London meets Law and Order SVU) and Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (the book, not the TV movie, although that was great as well) and shook them up in a jar, the result would be Murder as a Fine Art.
David Morrell weaves facts about mid-1800's London (some of which are absolutely horrifying) with a story of a brutal mass murderer (fiction, but based on some real cases, such as the Ratcliffe Highway murders) and injects them with a fictionalized version of the real British essayist Thomas De Quincey (of Confessions of an English Opium Eater fame). De Quincey wrote an essay entitled, "Murder as a Fine Art," which was the inspiration for both Morrell's novel and the killing spree of his fictional character therein. As such, the opium addicted De Quincey (in the novel) becomes the chief suspect in the murders and struggles to clear his name through a fog of drug addiction.
It's rare that a Victorian crime novel keeps me up half the night and sends me to bed with nightmares, but this one certainly did. It's definitely not cozy. But every time I felt my sense of horror pushing past the brink, thinking what I was reading was surely more at home in a novel like Red Dragon than in a Victorian detective story, Morrell brought it back to facts, injected some more history into it, which both calmed me and kept me reading well into the wee hours.
And thanks to David Morrell I now have an even longer reading list, as I can't wait to find out more about Thomas De Quincey, opium addiction and the Ratcliffe Highway murders. He reminds me of Kate Summerscale in that way. Actually no. It's more like if you were studying Victorian London in university, Kate Summerscale would be your favourite professor who had the most interesting lectures, but David Morrell would be the drunken professor who meets you down at the pub to tell you "a real story to make your hairs stand on end."
Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this book free from the publisher from NetGalley. I was not obliged to write a favourable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.
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