#BookReview #Ad Voices of the Dead by Ambrose Parry @canongatebooks

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About the Book

1854 marks the dawn of a scientific age. Queen Victoria delivers a healthy heir after receiving chloroform during labour. Florence Nightingale makes headlines as she leads a troop of middle-class women out into the war zones as nurses. In Edinburgh, we see Henry Littlejohn appointed as the city’s police surgeon, dubbing himself as the ‘medical detective’, investigating sudden deaths – whether accidental or intentional.

Never has there been a time where people have been so enthralled by possibilities of science, but this appetite for the amazing is also being fed by a new generation of showmen and magicians, whose invention and ingenuity leave the public often unable to distinguish between the wonders of technology and the art of illusion.

Several mesmeric hospitals pop up in Edinburgh, claiming remarkable cures and offering egalitarian training for men and women. While the medical establishment remains sceptical, Dr James Young Simpson has an open mind, dabbling in seances to give this niche study a fair chance. Having faced discrimination from the medical field on the basis of gender, Sarah Fisher sees the hospitals as a place for opportunity.

Great danger lies in the shadowlands between science and superstition, between genuine medical progress and cynical quackery, thus setting the stage for a grand and deadly illusion.

Format: eARC (416 pages) Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 15th June 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Voices of the Dead (Raven, Fisher and Simpson #4) on Goodreads

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My Review

Voices of the Dead is the fourth book in the authors’ Raven, Fisher and Simpson series of historical crime mysteries set in late nineteenth century Edinburgh. I’ve read all the previous books in the series – The Way of All Flesh, The Art of Dying and A Corruption of Blood – but I think this may be the best one yet. Voices of the Dead can be read as a standalone but you would miss out on the way the authors have developed the main characters and the relationships between them over the course of the series.

One of the things I like about the books is how the authors incorporate medical advances of the period, often the subject of controversy, into what are skilfully plotted, exciting crime mysteries. In this case, it’s the potential use of mesmerism to cure medical conditions.

Will Raven and Sarah Fisher are great characters with things in common, such as tragedy in their pasts, but also complementary qualities. Sarah is logical and practical, whereas Will is more the man of action. Their teasing, at times precariously close to intimate, relationship has been one of the joys of the series.

They both face moral dilemmas at some point in the book. Sarah is forced to consider whether her desire to embrace mesmerism as a path to achieving her ambition to be a doctor is blinding her to possible flaws in the claims of its efficacy. ‘Was her own desire to be of significance affecting her judgment? Was she craving being taken seriously to such an extent that she was losing perspective?’ I felt her frustration and the unfairness of her abilities not being recognised because of her sex.

Meanwhile Will finds himself having to choose between achieving his personal ambitions and his conscience. And, as before, he remains haunted by the violence of his past. As one character observes, ‘I have seldom seen a man with so many ghosts about him, You are surrounded by the dead.’ Yet now, as a husband and father, Will has even more reason to fear that legacy.

The book sees the return of some characters from previous books, a few in very different guises. I always think it shows skill to make a reader feel sympathy for a character who has serious flaws, but the authors manage to do it here to great effect. As befits a plot that involves the question of what is real and what is illusion, there are some great sleights of hand and misdirections. In the final chapters the action moves from gentle simmer to conflagration, in a neat echo of the prologue. There’s a tantalising sense of jeopardy and, at various points, I’m sure I won’t be alone in thinking, I really wouldn’t do that if I was you.

Voices of the Dead is an ingenious and absorbing historical crime mystery, and a splendid addition to the series. And, Ambrose Parry, what teases you are with that ending! Don’t make us wait too long for the next one.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Clever, intriguing, suspenseful

Try something similar: The Unquiet Heart by Kaite Welsh

About the Authors

Ambrose Parry is the penname for two authors – the internationally bestselling and multi-award-winning Chris Brookmyre and consultant anaesthetist of twenty years’ experience, Dr Marisa Haetzman. Inspired by the gory details Haetzman uncovered during her History of Medicine degree, the couple teamed up to write a series of historical crime thrillers, featuring the darkest of Victorian Edinburgh’s secrets. They are married and live in Scotland. 

The Way of All Flesh, The Art of Dying and A Corruption of Blood were shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year. A Corruption of Blood was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2022.

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#BookReview #Ad The Voluble Topsy, 1928 – 1947 by A P Herbert @KateHandheld

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About the Book

It is the late 1920s. Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. She deploys her native acumen and remarkable talent for kindness as well as being a doughty fighter for what she thinks is right (she hides a fox from the Hunt in her car). Then Topsy is unexpectedly drawn into politics, and to her amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.

Topsy’s extensive social life, her adventures in and out of the House of Commons (and her audacious attempts to legislate for the Enjoyment of the People), and her wartime activity as the mother of twins were recorded faithfully by the great comic writer A P Herbert as a series of satires in Punch.

Format: Paperback (360 pages) Publisher: Handheld Press
Publication date: 11th July 2023 Genre: Modern Clssics, Humour

Find The Voluble Topsy: A Young Lady’s Chatter About Love, Politics and War, 1928-1947 on Goodreads

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My Review

The Voluble Topsy, which will be published on 11th July 2023 by Handheld Press and is available to pre-order now, brings together three collections by A P Herbert – The Trials of Topsy (1928), Topsy MP (1929) and Topsy Turvy (1947) – in one volume. Subtitled ‘A Young Lady’s Chatter About Love, Politics and War, 1928-1947’, Topsy is described by the publishers as ‘the Bridget Jones of the 1920s’.

Topsy’s letters to her friend Trix with their eccentric spelling, malapropisms and mischevious pen pictures of acquaintances and public figures are an absolute hoot. The italicisation of certain words to suggest emphasis means you can hear Topsy’s voice in your head. (I think they might make a great audiobook – perhaps even a Topsy podcast?) One of the most amusing features of the letters is the eccentric terms of endearment with which she addresses Trix. Some of my favourites were ‘night-light of the North’, ‘my crystallised cherry’, ‘my aromatic angel’ and ‘my distant wood pigeon’.

As Kate MacDonald points out in her excellent introduction (Handheld Classics all have excellent introductions), Topsy ‘could never be accused of being pretentious or too learned’. Topsy is happy to offer her opinion on all sorts of things, regardless of whether she knows much about them or not. During a short stint as drama critic for a newspaper, she describes Shakespeare’s Othello as ‘written in the most amateur style… never using one word if it was possible to use three’, summarises the play as being about ‘one absolute cad and one absolute halt wit and one absolute cow‘ and offers the opinion that if they put the play on in the West End not a soul would go to it.

By far my favourite section of the book was the first, the letters that make up the collection The Trials of Topsy. Preaching the virtues of ‘the simple life’, Topsy deprecates the current fixation with exciting deeds, announcing her intention to shun anyone who’s flown the Atlantic or ‘needlessly swum something’. As she says, ‘all this rapidity is too volatile and bilious’. Instead she gives the example of her friend Albert Haddock who has ‘the most seductive mussel in a glass tank which only moves once in four days, my dear it’s too refreshing’.

In a foretaste of her future political career, Topsy has to step in when Haddock, who is standing as a candidate in a by-election, is unexpectedly detained and unable to give a speech. (I couldn’t help thinking of a similar scene in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.) As Topsy herself admits, ‘some of the things I said caused microscopic riots in one or two corners’.

Elected as an MP in unusual circumstances, Topsy divides her time between trying the patience of the Party whips and attempting to progress Private Member’s Bills, including one to reform the Gaming Laws. It contains a clause that would make it unlawful to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Nice try, Topsy. Unfortunately, it’s not long before Topsy becomes rather disillusioned with her constituents, confiding to Trix that she has come to the conclusion ‘my constituency is ‘THE cradle of the nation’s half-wits’. I confess I found this section of the book quite hard going as much of it seemed to be a satirical take on events or talking points of the day that won’t have the same relevance for modern readers.

In the final section of the book, Topsy, now a housewife and mother, unburdens herself to Trix about the continuing privations in post-War Britain, everything from the sluggish postal service to problems getting reliable tradesmen. No change there then… By the end I had some sympathy for poor old Haddock, increasingly chastised by Topsy for what she considers his slovenly ways. As she reports to Trix, ‘my dear his note-case is one protuberant mass of everything except notes, so about once a week I have a birds-nesting day and ruthlessly evacuate the loose tobacco and pipe-cleaners and patent medicines and pieces of string, my dear too miscellaneous…’ Of course, she remains completely devoted to him.

There is a rather lovely note to her Christmas letter to Trix in December 1945 in which she reports ‘it’s not quite snowing, but the house is thick with fog, the gas is anaemic, my tiny hands are frozen, I rather think all the pipes will explode to-night, gangsters I’m quite confident surround the home… but after all there will not be no sireens to-night, and peering through the fog I seem to see Britannia in the arms of Father Christmas, utterly illumined by rays of hope…’

Topsy’s letters to her friend Trix were first published in the weekly magazine Punch, each letter being three or four pages long. I think replicating that experience by dipping in and out, reading a few at a time, would be the ideal way to consume them; Topsy in small doses, if you like. I read the entire book over a couple of days for the purpose of this review and it did start to feel a little like binge-watching a comedy series that has 76 episodes and not getting all the jokes.

Having said that, Topsy is a brilliantly imagined character and, my fallen lily, she deserves to be rediscovered.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Handheld Press.

In three words: Witty, spirited, quirky

About the Author

A P Herbert (1890-1971) was one of Britain’s great comic writers and librettists and had a long career as a Member of Parliament, during which he was a dogged campaigner for the reform of outdated or unjust British laws.