The Fiend in Human - Hardcover

Gray, John M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679311734 ISBN 13: 9780679311737

Verlag: Random House Canada, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Already an international rights sensation, this dazzling thriller stalks and illuminates the dark, disintegrating walkways of Victorian London.

It’s 1852, and the ranks of the London poor have doubled. In the swollen shadow of the great St. Giles Rookery, fallen women attract perfumed dandies of the West End in a vicious circle of venality, vanity and vice.

Edmund Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, the city’s second-best sensational tabloid, writes whatever will stimulate the reader, delay his (increasingly physical) creditors, and supply him with the alcohol and opiates required to see him through the day. His most recent triumph was to supply a name to the fiend in human form who has murdered God knows how many prostitutes with a white silk scarf: Chokee Bill. To the correspondent’s satisfaction, Chokee Bill incited a garrotting panic that paralyzed the business of London -- until the arrest of one William Ryan. Normality has returned. The hangman, Mr. Calcraft, as dusty and dreary as death itself, awaits.

Broke again and in search of crisp copy, Whitty makes a shocking but not altogether surprising discovery: the white-scarf slayings have continued. When he endeavours to find the real Chokee Bill, he is greeted with emphatic hostility, both offcial and unoffcial.

This Dickensian tale offers galvanizing suspense and an evocative and witty vision of life in Victorian London -- in which the hallmark of a gentleman is perfection without, putrefaction within, and the hallmark of a lady is to have snared a gentleman.

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John MacLachlan Gray is a writer-composer-performer for the stage, film, television, radio and print. He is best known for his stage musicals, including the phenomenally successful Billy Bishop Goes to War, and for his satirical videos on CBC-TV’s The Journal. Gray is the recipient of many awards -- a Golden Globe, the Governor General’s Medal and most recently the Order of Canada. He currently writes a weekly column entitled “Gray’s Anatomy” for the Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver with his personal demons.

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“Gray has a gift for dialogue and a keen sense of humour, which comes out in the hilarious exchanges between Whitty and his rival cronies.” -- Hamilton Spectator

“Gray has whipped up a marvelous, richly textured confection. All the sights and sounds and impressions of a brilliantly evoked era are here, together with a dexterous plot and a feel for the embroidered yet briny language of the period.” -- Quill & Quire

“Gray has a strong sense of place and setting….He also has a gift for dialogue, and a keen humour, much in evidence here…the action sequences are skillfully wrought and compelling.” -- The Globe and Mail

“Sex, drugs, violence -- it’s all here, and presented with deliciously wry humour….the unraveling of this complicated skein of secrets makes for a fascinating, enjoyable read, full of twists, reversals and last-minute shocks.” -- The Edmonton Journal

“Tight and vivid, propelled by an addictive mystery plot, the book makes the efforts of his peers look like dilettantism…. Gray delivers crisp writing of his own throughout the book. …The Fiend In Human is anything but a newspaper columnist’s self-indulgence. A smart social commentary and ripping good tale, it’s clearly the work of a bona fide novelist firmly in control of his craft. A fly job, indeed, Mr. Gray.” -- National Post

“…riveting plot…Gray’s historical thriller is a step beyond slasher-horror plots. It presents us with the intellectual intrigues of murder, luring us with the hope that we can understand the stalker’s mentality…and the social evils that allow maniacs to thrive…He draws characters with colour and spark as vibrant as the theatre.” -- Ottawa Citizen

“…with this novel, [Gray] proves himself to be a true man of letters…Gray employs a Victorian style here to great effect. You feel as if you could be reading a novel from the period, rather than one merely set in that time…” -- New Brunswick Reader

“…Gray delivers and in spades.” -- Books in Canada

"The Fiend in Human gives the reader the kind of experience one wishes all historical novels provided but almost never do. It throws open the door on a side of Victorian London few will be acquainted with, and does so with an exuberance and wealth of detail worthy of the nineteenth-century masters. Vivid characters, dead-on dialogue, and a galloping good plot make The Fiend in Human a tale irresistible." -- Giles Blunt, author of Forty Words for Sorrow and The Delicate Storm

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A HANGING AT NEWGATE
Notes While On The Town
by Edmund Whitty, Correspondent
The Falcon


LONDON, 11 May 1852

For the better part of Monday 10 May the vicinity of Newgate Prison took on the aspect of a seasonal fair. Beginning at nine the previous evening, pilgrims crowded onto the square, past the abattoirs of Snow Hill and the approaches from Newgate Market, while surrounding streets echoed with the heavy boots of the great unwashed. Some came by rail, some by cart, still more on foot, from Hackney, Newham, Greenwich and Hammersmith, as well as the extremities of Greater London (Stinking Lane, Pie Corner), where the potteries, ironworks and slop shops, as though commanded by the chimes of St Sepulchre, disgorged their working poor for an unscheduled treat.

After all, what could provide a better tonic for the oppressed human spirit, than to witness the fate of one more wretched than oneself?

Cold fowl and cigars, pickled onions in jars
Welsh rabbit and kidneys -- rare work for the jaws
And very large lobsters with very large claws
And there is McFuze and Lieutenant Tregooze
And there is Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues,
All come to see a man die in his shoes!

Few retired to rest that night and all were too excited to sleep, passing the hours over draughts and cards, rattling the dice box while indulging in insulating potations, those who drank deepest jarring the night air with chorus after chorus of that depressing anthem for a hanging: ‘O My! O My! Think I’ve Got to Die!’ Among them wandered enterprising businessmen, renting out the last of the better positions: Beautiful prospect! Excellent situation! Favoured view!

As a professional your correspondent was permitted to observe the proceedings from a privileged position opposite and above the gallows, from which viewpoint the quality gather to take in the spectacle at £10 per seat. Indeed, the two young gentlemen beside us, Oxford men with an eye for the ladies and a patrician taste in cigars and brandy, seemed to regard the spectacle as existing purely for their own edification and amusement.

Below, more frugal enthusiasts paid in discomfort what their pocket-books could not afford; as early as two in the morning they took up their posts, stubbornly withstanding the pelting rain through six weary hours. Haggard and pinched they appeared by morning, especially the wretches accustomed to the airless factories and unwholesome abattoirs, with starved cheeks, toothless jaws and a moist milkiness of the eye. Not that the fellmongers, the glue-renderers, the carpenters and shoemakers appeared any more hardy or vigorous.

None the less, never did a more willing audience assemble to witness the most extreme penalty England has to offer the public other than a drawing and quartering -- and the latter, while still a sentencing option, has not been performed in fifty years.

To the chagrin of my two lusty companions, few females honoured the company with their presence, only a few gaudily dressed kept women with skin like peeled fruit, their more foresighted escorts having procured their company as an enjoyable prelude and epilogue to the coming event.

As a trickle of pale sunlight appeared between the clouds and over the slate of the eastward rooftops, an impatient throng could be discerned monotonously tracing the outline of a circle six persons deep, as though working a treadwheel, backed by the shadow of Newgate, their faces self-consciously gloomy in keeping with the enjoyment of sorrow. Within this moving wall of woe, children disported in the first rays of the sun, like drab butterflies, mistaking the aroma of gin for flowers.

No matter their physical occupation, every mind in the square turned in the same direction: to imagining the event to come, to savouring the knowledge that such horror was about to be inflicted upon somebody else.

In a few moments the clock of St Sepulchre will chime, and he will ascend the scaffold steps to the drop, a temporary machine connected to the wall of the prison by means of iron hooks; where a rope will be drawn through a chain and around his neck; and when the Chaplain pronounces the dreadful words, In the midst of life we are in death, Executioner Calcraft, as dusty and as dependable as death itself, will draw the pump-like handle, release the bolt, and a carcass will be all that remains of a man named Christopher Walden. Thereafter, the body will be cut down, to be interred an hour later within the walls of Newgate, dignified by neither coffin nor shroud, covered with lime and water, then buried and the ground smoothed so that, within the shortest time possible, the Fiend in Human Form -- this week’s edition at any rate -- will have been erased from the face of the earth, like a mistake in spelling.

And yet as a regular spectator of such public offerings at Newgate of a Monday morning, your correspondent cannot but wonder whether a second Fiend is brought to life by the elimination of the first -- a Fiend unconfined to the material remains of Christopher Walden, free to spread and drift like the black smoke from surrounding chimneys, to be inhaled by the population as a whole.

Not that the earth will be any the poorer for Walden’s absence.

Swell, fraud, corrupter of any misfortunate with whom he came into discourse, our man stands condemned for a brutal murder, under circumstances which your correspondent must refrain from repeating, by order of the Chief Magistrate of London. Let it suffice to note that Walden’s hanging is an eventuality akin to a long-standing infection laying claim to a voluptuary.

Yet again one wonders where the malignancy stops. In what society does such a Christopher Walden encounter a person of the rank of Arlington Fogg, and in such circumstances? What explanation exists that might entirely remove this blot to the legacy of Arlington Fogg? Like blood on bed-sheets, the stain will remain. A frisson of scandal to heighten the coming drama and to entertain the throng, while business is transacted for profit.

First come the refreshment peddlers, with food and drink made from putrid ingredients or adulterated with toxic substances. Next come the flying patterers and balladeers, to market their similarly unwholesome chronicles at five pence a page. In decades previous, when a man was condemned on Friday and summarily hanged on Monday, there was no time to prepare and print a ‘Last Confession’; now the condemned man is given at least a week’s grace and sometimes two -- and a commercial opportunity is born.

Prominent among these merchants of false news stands an author promoting a work entitled The Sorrowful Lamentation of William Ryan, Otherwise Known as Chokee Bill, an account distinguished by its utter disregard for the fundamental requisites of journalistic veracity, a work of fiction in all but name, whose unabashed purpose is to exploit the macabre achievement of its principal (in comparison to which Christopher Walden is a Piccadilly pickpocket), and the public dread it inspired, to lucrative effect.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679311734
• ISBN 13: 9780679311737
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Yeepin GmbH; 492000000000; sunshine12232@outlook.com; ; Alleestr.11; Kaiserslautern; Rheinland-Pfalz; 67655; Deutschland