| In which M. Murcek shares another happy discovery. |
Some writers have only one good book in them. Some have several books but only one is good. A hard situation for the reader is when you finish a book that’s so good you want more, but you already know that’s not happening.
Steven Price’s By Gaslight: A Novel is that sort of book. A fictional account of detective agency scion William Pinkerton chasing a ghost that haunted his father across the Civil War to Victorian London, the book had me making a side trip to study the crime argot of the era. That was painful only because the book was hard to put down.
Books that force us to expand our knowledge of other times and places are always a good thing for the serious reader. Characterization, pacing, details that make the scenes very real are all in abundance. Sorting his father Allen’s papers after his death, William discovers the founder of modern detection’s bete noir, the shadowy criminal Edward Shade. Unsettled by the peculiar lengths his father employed trying to track down Shade, William travels to London following the few and meager clues he has. The story shifts back and forth from the Civil War to the Victorian era and it becomes clear that William’s past is enmeshed with Shade’s, though neither know it. Shade, like all members of "the flash," the criminal underworld of the Victorian era, only wants to survive.
William’s hunt unconsciously morphs from a search for Shade to a search for the parts of his father that he doesn’t understand. With a strained association to Scotland Yard, William becomes involved in London society high and low. The tension and camaraderie with his British counterparts is one of the best flavors of the story. As William notes inconsistencies in the clues he gathers, the story seems it will have no resolution. Then, like all the best crime novels, the case is solved like a thunderclap. Only the best writers finish out a story with a coda that isn’t necessarily part of the bigger story, but, like stretching and walking it off after a run, it leaves the reader winded but not in distress. Price does this as only the best can.
Steven Price is a Canadian poet. I’ve not gotten to his poetry, but I will. His other novel is Into That Darkness, a sci-fi story that’s extremely different from By Gaslight. It’s not available as an ebook so I haven’t read it but I’ll be looking for a used dead tree copy soon.
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