The Dark Clue
When I stumbled over a remaindered copy of James Wilson's The Dark Clue (2001) last year, I decided that it would be either very interesting or very odd. For Victorianists bored with neo-Victorian pastiches of a) Dickens, b) Doyle, or c) Stoker, The Dark Clue at least offers an alternative: a pastiche of Wilkie Collins. Wilson's novel takes Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe from The Woman in White and, with a nudge from Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, sets them off to hunt down the truth about J. M. W. Turner. According to Lady Eastlake, a horrid man named Walter Thornbury (who was indeed Turner's first biographer) is out to blacken Turner's reputation. Her only hope: recruit someone to write the Truth.
Like Collins' best-known novels--The Woman in White included--The Dark Clue consists of diaries, letters, and memoranda. Walter and Marian dominate the proceedings, but there are occasional interjections from interviewees and an increasingly desperate Laura Hartright. In addition to Lady Eastlake and Sir Charles, there are brief walk-ons by a decidedly unpleasant John Ruskin (complete with Turner's erotica) and the scientist Mary Somerville. The plot itself unravels TWiW, for Hartright's quest to "rescue" Turner sends him spiralling into sexual depravity and, ultimately, insanity; his attempt at becoming a hero (at Marian's suggestion) turns him, in effect, into a combination of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie at their most helpless. Marian Halcombe, meanwhile, suffers from a secret passion for Walter. And the mystery itself is that there may well be no mystery at all, but only a "conspiracy" of the most boring financial variety.
As I said, this was either going to be very interesting or very odd, and my verdict comes down on the side of "very odd." The Dark Clue is Wilson's first novel, and he has not yet learned how to manage plot development: there's little forward energy, both characters are fairly incompetent detectives (Walter, in particular, tends to behave oddly even when he's not insane), and the narrative could have lost 1/3 of its length without any damage. Nor does Wilson negotiate the conceptual difficulties involved in sticking a Victorian novelist's fictional characters into the same story with several real Victorians, something that frequently leads to jarring results in Sherlock Holmes pastiches. (Historical fiction often struggles with the paradox that fictional characters may seem more "real" than the real ones; literary pastiches like The Dark Clue add another layer to the problematic cake.) More seriously, at this point Wilson cannot equal Collins' skill at differentiating voices, meaning that Marian and Walter sound virtually identical. Finally, as always seems to be the case in neo-Victorian fiction, male sexuality rapidly devolves into prostitutes, sadomasochism, and (ugh) rape. While this novel wasn't a bad idea per se, it required a more experienced novelist to carry it off.