Krishna
One more book from Anne Perry featuring Thomas Pitt. We have reviewed some earlier book with the same detective earlier.
Thomas Pitt is called to investigate a bizarre crime, where a body is found in a boat, the victim of a murder. The body is that of a man and is manacled to the boat and dressed in a woman’s satin clothing and arranged in a suggestive sexual pose after death, which makes it a very unusual case.
Thomas Pitt is relieved that the corpse is not that of the French embassy official who was missing, thereby avoiding an international scandal. But who is he?
Also, as is her wont, the author comments on the social mores of the time through side strands of the story that makes it very effective and adds to the weight of the story. This time it is through a play that Pitt and Charlotte’s mother Caroline go to, where a woman shows her loneliness too plainly for everyone to notice (in the story) as she is not supposed to in ‘civilized society’. Anne rails against the restrictions on woman who are not supposed to show so crass an emotion like sexual desire.
Pitt identifies the man as a high end photographer who takes pictures of people in their fancy costumes and brings out ‘the real soul’ in each of them with clever lighting, and other additions. Caroline’s mother is appalled at Edward being ‘shamelessly flirted with’ by her daughter.
A French Diplomat seems to be somehow involved. Unusually for Anne Perry’s stories, Oscar Wilde makes a cameo appearance in the story! And when the poet Yeats also makes an appearance, the story really goes off the usual path of Anne Perry stories. However, both are only appearing fleetingly and have nothing to do with the main strand of the story itself. There is a hint in the story that they also appeared in an earlier story by Anne Perry but I have not read that one, whatever that book is.
My complaint is that she got carried too far into the social message, which is definitely interesting (of free expression of passion by women and women’s right to be informed of the uglier facets of life instead of being protected by men) that the main story hardly moves at all from time to time.
Mariah, Caroline’s dead husband’s mother, who is staying with her now since Emily is away with her husband, disapproves of the unseemly friendship between Samuel Ellison and the twice married Caroline. Having failed to persuade Caroline’s actor husband Joshua to take the threat seriously, she decides on dishonesty and writes a letter filled with flirtatious intentions to Samuel in Caroline’s name and handwriting in desperation. Then when set up, she calls Joshua to ‘witness the wantonness’. When she is found out, she is contrite, and in a conversation she admits to the penchant of her husband for sodomy. (‘Unnatural acts’) which has deeply affected her.
Meanwhile, Pitt and Tellman find out that the money for the cameramen came from salacious pictures sold clandestinely of women, who may or may not have been aware of what is gong on. When one of the pictures of the famous actress Antrim is in the exact same pose as the murdered person, Pitt knows there is a strong connection. Caroline finds out where the pictures were bought from – in an independent way from Pitt, who tracks it to another wholesaler. When he confronts Antrim with it, she reveals a whole new side to her.
Caroline proves she can stand up to Antrim (Cicily) even when she is pissed that her son, who is a newbie, upstaged her in Hamlet. She suspects that he has some evil torment in him in order to be able to portray Hamlet to near perfection.
Well, the ending has the requisite twist but has the feeling of an abrupt ending, with no clues about the murder – this is not a book where you can guess who did it by reading it because there seems to be no clues except a direct explanation at the end.
Anne Perry can do social commentary of the Victorian era with the mystery part well and gets it near perfect in some books (For one example, read our review of A Breach of Promise elsewhere in this blog) but in this book, the social commentary seems to take over the entire book with a murder put in there as an afterthought.
Also the initial confusion about whether the murdered man was the French ambassador or not is a bit confusing. You feel definitely that it holds an important clue, but you find out otherwise at the end, which gives you a feeling of being let down.
All in all, still a readable book, but by no means one of Anne’s best.
Let us say 6/10
- – Krishna