Mayhem

[sawyl]

Following one of Eric Brown's roundups in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading Sarah Pinborough's excellent Victorian murder mystery, Mayhem. Set in London, it follows the real-life figure of Doctor Thomas Bond as he struggles with both the Thames Torso Murders and the Ripper killings.

The book opens in October of 1888, when Thomas Bond is called in to inspect a rotting torso discovered in excavations for the new police headquarters. With the assistance of his colleague, Charles Hebbert, Bond soon matches the torso to an arm retrieved from the Thames three weeks early and the pair conclude that the torso is not one of the Ripper's victims but is related an early set of body parts found in the river at Rainham. Confronted with the twin horrors of the Ripper murders and the Torso killings, both Hebbert and Bond find themselves struggling to maintain their sanity any way they can, with the former drinking heavily and the latter descending into opium addiction.

Searching for a dubious sort of peace in the opium dens of Bluegate Fields, Bond changes across a mysterious man who reveals that the Rainham may not be due to mere insanity but may instead by due to something more primal. With the help of a pair of strange allies, Bond begins to get a clearer idea of the identity of his quarry and begins his pursuit in earnest. At the same time, he has to keep up a facade of normality, hiding both his spiralling drug problem and his obsessive quest from the police and from the Hebbert family.

Mayhem skillfully blends an horrific pair of unsolved historical murders with a genuinely gripping and increasingly supernatural narrative. The story is primarily told from the first-person viewpoint of Thomas Bond, who starts out as a strict materialist but gradually finds himself forced to reconsider his views in light of the increasingly fantastic things he sees. Additional details of the murders, usually key events that occurred when Bond was not present, are filled in from the third person perspectives of various other historical figures, including Elizabeth Jackson and Inspector Henry Moore, which much of the supernatural backstory is elucidated via a series of diary entries — a clear nod to Dracula

The characters are well written — Bond is a particularly likeable if flawed protagonist — and while the plot moves along at a fair clip, mixing historical with fictional events, it doesn't neglect stint the horror. Not only are there individual scenes of awfulness — such as the particularly appalling moment when Bond finally looks upon his opponent with his own eyes &mash; but there are the cumulative horrors of a squalid city that seems to be awash with blood and a hero who, despite the knowledge of what he is doing to himself, continues to slip into drug addition, ill-health and possible madness because he feels that it is the only way he can continue to cope with his increasingly terrible obligations.

Very highly recommended.