The Detective and the Devil
[Disclaimer: when I was last in England, the author bought me a soda. I'm not quite sure that that constitutes a conflict of interest, sodas being relatively inexpensive even in England, but full transparency and all that...]
The title of Lloyd Shepherd's fourth and (apparently) final entry in his Charles Horton historical mysteries yokes together modern and ancient, rational and supernatural, law and evil. But these binaries turn out to be not so neat after all. At the same time, the novel also cleverly subverts some of the reader's own expectations, given the series' mix of historical fiction, Gothic horror, and murder mystery. All of the Horton novels so far have rung changes on the imperial Gothic mode: English characters go abroad seeking glory (theoretically) and profit (actually), commit a crime, and then bring back the supernatural ramifications of that act to England itself. Thus, believing in their own success, the English instead find themselves importing their own greed and colonial violence under very different forms. This alternate history of empire, though, exists in tandem with the very rational history of our empirical friend Horton, whose knack for interpreting a crime scene helps usher in the birth of modern policing. (In fact, Horton--identified as a "detective" for the first time--is now something of a pre-Holmesian celebrity, with a fan club that includes a reasonably helpful Charles Lamb.) Significantly, Horton has spent the past three novels in a state of some confusion, never quite grasping the secrets lying just beyond his investigations.
The Detective and the Devil, though, inverts the plot structure of the previous three novels. Instead, it opens with a man from the Netherlands, Jacobus Aakster, robbing John Dee's English household in search of a mysterious Arabic manuscript--which, as is explained much later, Dee could not read--for the nascent Dutch East India Company. After memorizing and destroying the manuscript, Aakster establishes a very profitable business indeed by doing the...thing...(not explained for some time) contained therein--a business that continues down several generations, right through the emergence of England's own East India Company. (Enter our heroes.) The ancient manuscript, which passes from "a rogue Janissary" to a "Jewish merchant from Portugal" (291) to Dee, before being stolen by Aakster, may be very Gothic--found manuscripts being central to the classic Gothic tradition--but its transit to England doesn't involve the same criminality marking the imports in Shepherd's earlier novels. Instead, in a nice irony, a representative of a foreign empire violates English space and then turns himself (and all of his descendants) into this hotly-desired object; the family's centuries-long residence on St. Helena, moreover, puts them first in the trammels of the Dutch and then the English East India Companies, but in the interests of safety, the keepers of the secret cannot return to England (or the Netherlands, for that matter). This, too, is very Gothic. As are all the returning characters and crimes from the previous novels, as though past murders were returning, in good supernatural fashion, to haunt a too-complacent present.
There is, however, yet another catch. Shepherd repeatedly alludes, both explicitly and implicitly, to Shakespeare's The Tempest, which many critics have understood as a reflection on early modern imperialism (guy shows up, takes over island, subjugates inhabitants including the monstrous Other, etc.). Horton watches The Tempest; there's an actual (and centuries-old...) Caliban on St. Helena, which is, of course, an island; there are multiple allusions to wizardry, starting with John Dee himself. But there's one more aspect of The Tempest that's important. As I shall be conjuring up some spoilers, let's head below the fold.
OH
The title of Lloyd Shepherd's fourth and (apparently) final entry in his Charles Horton historical mysteries yokes together modern and ancient, rational and supernatural, law and evil. But these binaries turn out to be not so neat after all. At the same time, the novel also cleverly subverts some of the reader's own expectations, given the series' mix of historical fiction, Gothic horror, and murder mystery. All of the Horton novels so far have rung changes on the imperial Gothic mode: English characters go abroad seeking glory (theoretically) and profit (actually), commit a crime, and then bring back the supernatural ramifications of that act to England itself. Thus, believing in their own success, the English instead find themselves importing their own greed and colonial violence under very different forms. This alternate history of empire, though, exists in tandem with the very rational history of our empirical friend Horton, whose knack for interpreting a crime scene helps usher in the birth of modern policing. (In fact, Horton--identified as a "detective" for the first time--is now something of a pre-Holmesian celebrity, with a fan club that includes a reasonably helpful Charles Lamb.) Significantly, Horton has spent the past three novels in a state of some confusion, never quite grasping the secrets lying just beyond his investigations.
The Detective and the Devil, though, inverts the plot structure of the previous three novels. Instead, it opens with a man from the Netherlands, Jacobus Aakster, robbing John Dee's English household in search of a mysterious Arabic manuscript--which, as is explained much later, Dee could not read--for the nascent Dutch East India Company. After memorizing and destroying the manuscript, Aakster establishes a very profitable business indeed by doing the...thing...(not explained for some time) contained therein--a business that continues down several generations, right through the emergence of England's own East India Company. (Enter our heroes.) The ancient manuscript, which passes from "a rogue Janissary" to a "Jewish merchant from Portugal" (291) to Dee, before being stolen by Aakster, may be very Gothic--found manuscripts being central to the classic Gothic tradition--but its transit to England doesn't involve the same criminality marking the imports in Shepherd's earlier novels. Instead, in a nice irony, a representative of a foreign empire violates English space and then turns himself (and all of his descendants) into this hotly-desired object; the family's centuries-long residence on St. Helena, moreover, puts them first in the trammels of the Dutch and then the English East India Companies, but in the interests of safety, the keepers of the secret cannot return to England (or the Netherlands, for that matter). This, too, is very Gothic. As are all the returning characters and crimes from the previous novels, as though past murders were returning, in good supernatural fashion, to haunt a too-complacent present.
There is, however, yet another catch. Shepherd repeatedly alludes, both explicitly and implicitly, to Shakespeare's The Tempest, which many critics have understood as a reflection on early modern imperialism (guy shows up, takes over island, subjugates inhabitants including the monstrous Other, etc.). Horton watches The Tempest; there's an actual (and centuries-old...) Caliban on St. Helena, which is, of course, an island; there are multiple allusions to wizardry, starting with John Dee himself. But there's one more aspect of The Tempest that's important. As I shall be conjuring up some spoilers, let's head below the fold.
OH
BRAVE
NEW
WORLD
THAT
HATH
SUCH
SPOILERS
IN
IT
Prospero and his buddy Ariel are capable, among many other things, of casting illusions. And in one of the novel's most subversive moves, it turns out that the "magic" associated with the mysterious manuscript is not magic at all--it's a real process used for mining gold, here discovered rather earlier than in reality. Horton's wife Abigail foreshadows this revelation when she points out the connections between alchemy and modern chemistry. Aside from the Caliban figure, Fernando Lopez (here, made immortal by the island), the novel is in fact almost entirely free from the supernatural traces featuring in the previous three books. In an ironic subversion of the Gothic "conversion" trope (skeptical guy realizes that the supernatural is real, amends ways), when Horton dramatically declares that Mina Baxter, current holder of the secret, clearly knows "the route to eternal life" and must be "more than two hundred years old" (300), he is rewarded with an eye-roll and a tour of the gold refining works. Similarly, while the eponymous Devil, Edgar Burroughs, seems demonic enough, what with the dead eyes, red hair, and cruelty, the hooves that Abigail repeatedly imagines remain figurative. (The other "devil" [87] is Napoleon, who doesn't make an appearance until the very end.) Burroughs turns out to have been the moving force behind the novel's various horrors, but he's a human moving force with human motivations. Having finally figured things out, Horton has...not figured things out; he abandons his empiricism just when it's actually suitable for the task at hand.
But there is a real Monster--other than the Corsican one (143)--and it is imperialism itself, in the form of the East India Company. The Company, as Horton's superior John Harriott reminds him, "is very much like a nation unto itself" (127), which makes it sit oddly in relationship to any simple narratives of patriotic endeavor. This is already apparent from our first view of its central office building, likened to a "public school bully" and an open-mawed "whale" (53), which suggests that the Company will prey on and devour both the indigenous peoples it exploits and the English. Voluntarily feeding themselves to the beast in the name of profit, the English hand over their consciences to be consumed. The very interior space of the building, in which "[l]eft turns followed right turns through a random progression of corridors and staircases," seems to embody the Company's "strange secret histories" (63); later, Horton contemplates "the anonymous doors off the corridors, the shadows and the corners" (137). This ought to be a Gothic castle, and yet it is a bustling hub of business. Bewildering, mazelike, the Company's core turns what ought to be familiar English architecture into the uncanny, turning urban London weird. The Company's deliberate aura of mystery takes the place of magic, as it were; instead of John Dee's or Prospero's spells and eerie conversations, we have the illusions of ideology. Sir Joseph Banks inadvertently puts it best: "Some people call these things magic. I say any reality we do not yet understand will appear to be magical" (162). Which tells us more about the plot and its implications than Banks realizes. Banks talks of Dee's quest for immortality, but what is at stake on St. Helena is gold and profit.
Most of the novel's murders are committed via cyanide poisoning--in other words, by the same chemical used to extract the gold. Horton muses to himself that "[i]ts stench hung over these murders, both literally and figuratively" (171), but it seems to me that cyanide hangs over the plot in another way as well. On the one hand, it renders the hunger for gold inseparable from death, for there is no mining without the ever-present threat of poison. Indeed, the very first successful trial of the process during the sixteenth century leads to someone dying from cyanide (293). On the other hand, the poison's habit of wafting through the air suggestively reminds us, once again, of the moral danger to England posed by its desire for more and more gain. After Horton is overcome by cyanide at an ice house on Burroughs' residence, he imagines the "madness" that might follow from the gas' spread throughout London, some miles away (177); returning home to find cyanide (and a corpse), he carries a sample to Harriott, leaving Wapping "poisoned" as he goes (182). Detectable only by those who already know what it is--who recognize the nature of the illusion--this imaginary spread of cyanide throughout the metropolis hints at the insidious quality of greed. Or, for that matter, of the belief in imperial glories: an anguished Harriott moans that the Company is like an "infection" that has contaminated what used to be a "glorious enterprise," but instead is just "the pursuit of financial gain" (186). From this series' point of view, of course, the empire has never been any sort of "glorious enterprise," and has always been about "financial gain"; nostalgia, perhaps, is its own brand of cyanide poisoning.