BKMT READING GUIDES
Murder as a Fine Art
by David Morrell
Hardcover : 368 pages
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GASLIT LONDON IS BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES IN DAVID MORRELL'S BRILLIANT HISTORICAL THRILLER.
Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones ...
Introduction
Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years earlier.
The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives.
In Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history. Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.
Editorial Review
Illustrations for Murder as a Fine Art
A Review by Katherine Neville
NY Times and #1 international bestseller Katherine Neville has been referred to as "the female" Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, and Stephen Spielberg. Her adventure-packed Quest novels have been called a "feminist answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark," (Washington Post) and were credited with having "paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code" (Publishers Weekly).
At first glance, Murder as a Fine Art--a jewel-like, meticulously-crafted historic detective story, set in the high-Raj period of Victorian England--might seem a complete departure for the king of the Thriller genre and "father of Rambo." It takes a tremendous commitment, not to mention a bit of a risk, for a writer like David Morrell, at the pinnacle of a long and successful career, to decide to create a work in a very different genre.
Morrell's secret weapon, which for decades has placed him at the very forefront of suspense writers, has always been his use of impeccable hands-on research: he has honed the art of seamlessly interweaving rich troves of fascinating detail into his plot lines and character sketches, so that we readers never feel--as so often happens with background research found in fiction--that we are being subjected to a tutorial.
Part of the reason Morrell's research has always paid off so well in his previous works has been his relentless quest to learn and master many of the skills he was writing about: flying the airplanes, loading the weapons, earning the black belts. He has rehearsed his characters' skills much as an actor rehearses a character role. But in Murder as a Fine Art, how would he accomplish this, when the story is set in the 1850s, and his main protagonists are a young woman who is self-liberated from Victorian constraints, including her corset!--and her father, a notorious opium addict! He accomplishes it, and brilliantly, by steeping himself so thoroughly in the context of nineteenth century London that, in his own words, he became "a Method actor," guiding us through the London fog (I never knew it was filled with charcoal!)--while acting out in his mind the roles of these real historic figures.
The "Opium Eater" himself, our lead character, was author Thomas de Quincey, a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge who wrote thousands of pages that today largely have been forgotten. But his most infamous book of the day, and one that has long outlived him, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was so scandalous that it topped the charts of that era and was preached against (perhaps with good cause) in the churches. De Quincy helped spawn the school of "sensationalist" literature, with his memoirs and essays influencing fiction writers from Wilkie Collins to Edgar Allan Poe to Arthur Conan Doyle.
Morrell has chosen to open his novel in 1854 because that date marks the publication of the final installment of de Quincey's equally shocking three-part essay: "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," a lurid and gory description with pre-Freudian overtones, of East End murders that took place more than forty years before our story begins. The novel opens with de Quincey arriving in London for his essay's publication, accompanied by his daughter Emily, to learn that he himself is suddenly the prime suspect in a murder that precisely replicates those decades-old killings he'd so lavishly described in his book.
This wonderful set-up provides the real historic character, Thomas de Quincey, with the fictional opportunity to match his laudanum-enhanced wits against the villain's, while simultaneously utilizing his vast learning about the first crimes, and his personal understanding of the subconscious and sublimation, in aiding the police to solve the actual crimes. It doesn't hurt that Morrell's own vast learning enlightens us along the way, with asides on little known Victoriana, covering everything from the gutters, sewers and cesspools of the seamy side of London, to the highest echelons (equally seamy) of British political and bureaucratic corruption.
In fleshing out this era for us, Morrell has deployed one of the favorite Victorian novelistic vehicles: an omniscient narrator who can fill us in on "back story" contexts and details--everything from the vast panorama of the the Opium Wars between Britain and China, to fascinating minutiae like the 37-pound costumes that women wore daily, made of yards of fabric over whalebone hoops and corsetry. There is something about using this particular literary technique, in a book like this, that rings truer than a straight narrative because it is a storytelling style so accepted that it appears in nearly every novel of the period. Perhaps for Morrell's use of this particular method of reportage, Murder as a Fine Art has been compared with recent books that are set in the past, like The Dante Club and The Alienist; I would add that it also brings to mind another tour de force: the stunning literary footwork of an author who lured us into another alien era with equal mastery and success: John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman.
But my personal favorite in Murder as a Fine Art is the character of Emily de Quincey. Who could not cherish a girl who can shed her whalebone cinches and don a pair of bloomers so she can dash down streets and leap gutters alongside the London constabulary? A girl with the wits to mess up her hair, rip open her bodice, and stagger into an angry mob that's threatening her police escort, and to divert the rabble to her imaginary "attacker" at the opposite end of the alley? Emily repeatedly saves the day by paying attention to the people around her, their needs and desires; by grasping how the context of their lives alters the roles they are able to play in it; by using her wits and her common sense as a complement to her father's brilliant, if drug-induced, vision.
The vicious psychotic killer may have been thwarted this time around, but I suspect that Emily de Quincey's services will still be needed to keep London streets safe from other threats creeping out of the dank London fog, in future: I vote for a sequel, Mr Morrell!
Excerpt
In all my adventures with Father, I can now add one more: being arrested. Constable Becker and the ruffian who said his name was Detective-Inspector Ryan insisted that was not the case, but the somberness of their expressions and the haste with which they wanted to place us in a police wagon belied their assurances. “Go with you to Scotland Yard? Why?” Father demanded as the fog swirled around us. “We have questions,” the ruffian said. “About what?” “The Ratcliffe Highway murders.” “Everything I have to say about them is in my latest book. Why do you care about something that happened forty-three years ago?” “Not forty-three years ago,” the ruffian said. I have difficulty referring to him as a detective-inspector. “Of course it was forty-three years ago,” Father replied. “Do detectives not have schooling? Subtract eighteen hundred and eleven from—” “Last night,” Ryan said. “Excuse me?” “The murders happened last night.” The statement made the air feel colder. Even in the fog, I could see Father straighten. “Murders last night?” he whispered. “Can anyone account for your activities between ten and midnight?” Becker asked. From Ryan, the question would have been challenging, but the constable made it sound respectful. “No.” “Please tell us where you were.” Again, the constable’s tone was assuring. “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” Ryan interrupted rudely. “Does your laudanum habit weaken your memory?” “My memory is excellent.” “Then perhaps you were too affected by the drug to know what you were doing last night.” “I know what I was doing. I just don’t know where.” Ryan shook his head. “What opium does to people.” Constable Becker stepped forward, kindly asking me, “May I have your name, Miss?” “Emily De Quincey. I’m his daughter.” “Can you help us understand what your father is trying to say?” “I meant what I said. It’s perfectly clear,” Father told them. “If you’d asked me what I was doing instead of where I was, I could have told you I was walking.” “Walking? That late?” Ryan interrupted again as fog swirled around us. I began to sense a stratagem that they had calculated before we arrived, the ruffian trying to make us feel threatened while the constable was solicitous, in the hopes that the contrast between them would confuse us into making careless statements. “My father walks a great deal,” I explained. “Especially if he is making an effort to reduce his laudanum intake, he spends much of his time walking.” “One summer in the Lake District” Father said proudly, “I walked two thousand miles.” “Two thousand miles?” Ryan looked puzzled. “It’s cold out here,” Father said. “Instead of pursuing this conversation for the neighbors to hear, may we go inside?” “Where we need to go is Scotland Yard,” Ryan insisted. “And is there a necessary on your wagon, or will you stop on the way so that we can use one?” Father added with a turn to me, “Excuse the reference, my dear.” Now Father was the one employing a stratagem. He has never used a genteel synonym for a privy. “I forgive you, Father.” “The necessary in the house is remarkable,” Father told Ryan and Constable Becker. “Our housekeeper tells me it’s modeled after a water device introduced at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park three years ago. ‘A flush with every push,’ I believe the motto is. She says that the inventor charged a penny a flush. Almost six million visitors to the Great Exhibition. Imagine, a penny from each of them.” Ryan sighed. “Very well. Let’s go into the house.”
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Discussion Questions
1. Going to 1854 London is like going to Mars. The culture was so different that many times we need a guide of the sort that you find in Murder as a Fine Art. What are some of the most curious differences between our culture and that of the Victorian era?2. Opium is a major topic in Murder as a Fine Art. What are some of the ways that it dominated Victorian culture? Consider the look of a typical Victorian sitting room, for example, and the fainting spells that Victorian women frequently experienced. What did opium have to do with the British economy?
3. Thomas De Quincey solves murders by invoking the theories of Emmanuel Kant, a highly unusual approach. Kant asked the question, “Does reality exist outside us or mainly in our minds?” This isn’t as abstract as it seems. As De Quincey points out, consider that the stars are above us only at the north pole. Similarly, the sun doesn’t rise or set. Instead the Earth turns while the sun remains constant. In which other ways could what we think of as reality turn out to be an illusion?
4. Because of his opium addiction, Thomas De Quincey is a flawed main character, and yet his imperfection is what makes him interesting. How do you feel about flawed main characters and in particular about De Quincey?
5. To me, Emily De Quincey is the novel’s secret weapon. Whenever I wrote a scene about her, I couldn’t help smiling. What purpose does she serve in Murder as a Fine Art, and why did I find it necessary to include her first-person journal entries?
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