Book Review – A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

About the Book

The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London’s back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War.

Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders himself, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: The Britannia. But when a gentleman’s wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim’s last words echo in the Lieutenant’s head: that he would “soon right a great wrong from the past.”

Eric is certain that one of his fellow members is the murderer: but who? Captain Mortimer Wolfe, the soldier’s soldier thrice escaped from German custody? Second Lieutenant Oliver Saxon, the brilliant codebreaker? Or Captain Edward Aldershott, the steely club president whose Savile Row suits hide a frightening collision of mustard gas scars?

Eric’s investigation will draw him far from the marbled halls of the Britannia, to the shadowy remains of a dilapidated war hospital and the heroin dens of Limehouse. And as the facade of gentlemenhood cracks, Eric faces a Matryoshka doll of murder, vice, and secrets pointing not only to the officers of his own club but the very investigator assigned by Scotland Yard.

Format: ebook (344 pages) Publisher: Inkshares
Publication date: 31st July 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

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My Review

A Gentleman’s Murder is the first book in the author’s historical crime series featuring amateur sleuth, Eric Peterkin. In fact, as the book starts Eric doesn’t know he’s going to be adopting the role of sleuth. It’s only once a murder occurs at the Britannia Club where he’s a member (as have generations of Peterkins been before him) that he feels obliged to conduct his own investigation. In addition, something he glimpses shortly after the murder is discovered makes him doubt how thoroughly the police will conduct the investigation.

Making Eric the son of a Chinese mother and English father not only makes him distinctive as a character but allows the author to address the racism of the time fuelled by sterotypical images of Chinese people contained in ‘Yellow Peril’ novels and plays which portrayed the Chinaman as a master-criminal involved in prostitution, gambling and opium smoking. (You can read more about this, as well other themes in the book, in Christopher Huang’s fascinating Author’s Note.)

The murder is not so much a ‘locked room’ mystery as a ‘locked vault’ mystery. As well as the means by which the murder was carried out, there are missing items which Eric suspects are vital to discovering the motivation for the murder and the identity of the murderer. It means a journey back into the past and the lives of those injured both physically and psychologically in the Great War, many of whom still bear the scars.

I really enjoyed this aspect of the book which brings home the lasting impact of the war, even on those who survived it. Eric himself is haunted by memories of what he witnessed in the trenches and increasingly feels a sense of guilt that he has not taken the trouble to find out how the soldiers under his command have fared since the war ended.

The author has constructed a cunningly plotted crime mystery with a range of possible suspects each of whom might have had a motive to carry out the murder. Very observant readers may spot a small detail at the beginning of the book which points to the culprit. I suspect most, like me, will only recognise this in retrospect after the solution has been revealed.

My one reservation was that I didn’t feel I got to know Eric very well as a person, not just as a sleuth. There were things I wanted to know, such as how he and his friend Avery met. It felt almost as if this was the second book in a series and those things had been spelled out in the earlier book. I’m hoping I get to know Eric a little better when he returns in A Pretender’s Murder.

A Gentleman’s Murder is a clever historical mystery with a great sense of period. Definitely recommended for fans of ‘Golden Age’ crime novels .

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Inkshares.

In three words: Intriguing, intricate, atmospheric
Try something similar: The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead

About the Author

Christopher Huang was born in Singapore, where he lived out the first seventeen years of his life. He moved to Canada in the expectation of cooler weather, returning to Singapore the following year to serve his two years of National Service in the Singapore Army. He studied architecture at McGill University, and lived the next twenty-odd years in Montreal. He now lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he has yet to find a proper jar of real, actual Bovril. A longtime fan of the principles of fair play governing the mystery genre, he thinks of detective stories as an early form of interactive fiction. He is, of course, very fond of modern interactive fiction as well. (Bio/photo: Author website)

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