“Ambrose Parry” is the crime novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife Marisa Haetzman, an anaesthetist. So it is unsurprising that James Simpson, who pioneered the use of chloroform in 19th-century Edinburgh, has a role in the book, and that it has a grand guignol thriller plot. Though it will carry you perfectly through a lazy afternoon, it suffers from many of the defining characteristics of pastiche Victoriana: it has to have something old, something new, something borrowed and something in 50 shades of blue. “No decent story ought to begin with a dead prostitute,” declares chapter one – and yet, behold, it does.
Will Raven, an apprentice to Simpson, has a dark secret – and not only that he fled the scene where he found his lover dead. Sarah Fisher is the plucky housemaid for the Simpsons, who has ideas above her station (the number of proto-feminist activists in 21st-century fiction set in the 19th century is quite remarkable). When more women turn up dead, the two investigate while doing a cosplay version of Mulder and Scully. The red herrings are almost signalled, and the eventual reveal of the murderer should be no surprise. Like many products of this genre, the book shoehorns in historical characters. Why shouldn’t the pair meet the photographers David Hill and Robert Adamson, or call on Inspector James McLevy? (Who will we meet in future volumes: Stevenson? Conan Doyle? James Clerk Maxwell?) And, as one might expect, there are fulminatory passages about homeopathy and the “fat martyrs” of the Free Church.
The style is vaguely orotund and coy. People are “abed”; there are voluble tempers; lusts are slaked, seed spilled (twice in two pages). And there is a persistent passive – “all obstructing millinery was removed”; “Was it right that such a thing be displayed?” Then there is the classic cliche of Old Town and New Town. “That was Edinburgh for you: public decorum and private sin,” the “self-deception” of “public and private places”. This trope is becoming so threadbare as to be diaphanous.
Depictions of the 19th century that combine a nostalgia for the old and a hankering after progress are oddly seductive to agents, publishers and readers. For every working-class woman full of vim and wit, there is typically a counterbalance of dispensable “hoors”, often given less characterisation than the comedy dog or the wily butler.
• The Way of All Flesh is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £10.49 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
