Whenever I pick up a historical novel, especially a crime novel, I am always slightly fearful of how the historicism has been managed. No fear with the highly readable Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, expert in the history of the crime genre and with two impressive series set in the modern day already under his belt. Gallows Court is the sharpest, cleanest and most authentic re-enactment of a Golden Age detective novel that I've ever seen hit the page. From the start we're completely in the world of the era. There is no sense of over-knowing awareness in some complicated implied-author sense, no feeling that we're parodying the genre or the era, or the people, or their views for not being as postmodern as us. And nor are we over-loaded with details in some kind of foggy nostalgia festival. There is no sense of:
...the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day...
...with all that implied distance. We're just there: no period ephemera required. It sounds simple but it is oh-so-hard to do.*
Moving on from setting to plot and people, the main characters are engaging: the wonderful creation of the detective / journalist Jacob who is bright enough to keep us with him and with failings enough to keep us thinking we might get to the answers ahead of him (always a great driver in a novel). He surely deserves another run out in a further volume. And the brilliantly drawn women in his life, Elaine, Mrs Dowd, Sara Delamere and Rachel Savernake, turn the sleepy gentlemen's clubs and Bunter-interviewing-the-housekeeper male-female business-domestic dichotomies of the standard Golden Age novel on their head. This is truly a golden historical novel, but for our time not theirs.
The plot is tightly drawn, keeps wrong-footing you, and clues are gently disguised. I was gripped to the end.
Martin Edwards has another 1930s novel out, Mortmain Hall. I won't say which character(s) carry on into the second book as that's a big spoiler alert for the plot of the first. This is a series best read in order. Together they'd make a great present including for yourself.
Martin Edwards has a website here and you can follow him on Twitter here. He blogs at Do You Write Under your Own Name ...
*Even when an author gets it right it is often ruined by the publisher. I have been irritated by two historical crime novels within the last week. One by someone not British but with the book purportedly set here with an English cast of characters using words like 'color', 'labor' and 'woolen', and the other with a focus on counties in the 1930s which had the wrong counties (i.e. post 1974 administrative) on the cover. So hats off to both Martin Edwards and Head of Zeus for getting this so right you don't notice it: you can can glide from Sayers to Edwards to Christie without feeling the bump as you go over the chronological points!
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