The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Clark, Clare. The Great Stink. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005.

William May, the fictional protagonist, is a surveyor for the real Metropolitan Board of Works. From 1856 to 1870, the board led by its chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette who plays a minor part in the novel, built 80 miles of sewers under London. This massive infrastructure transformed the city and the Thames that runs through it.

May spends a lot of time in the crumbling old sewer that are soon to be joined and transformed by the board. The filth of London is the least of the horrors of Victorian England that he must overcome. He faces the Crimean War, a military hospital ship, corruption in politics and business, an insane asylum, prison, an indifferent justice system and his own misunderstood mental illness.

Though the novel is set in the midst of an enormous engineering project and the main character has such a breadth of experience, the story focuses on a few people coping with a changing (modernizing) world. Their stories are brought together by petty murder committed by a greedy man.

May, who except for his misfortune might be considered middle-class by 19th century standards, is contrasted to Long Arm Tom. Tom is a tosher; he makes his living recovering copper and other valuable material from the sewage and waste of the city. Many of London’s poorest lived by extracting meager value from waste. The great sewer project was brining and end to Tom’s profession.

May and Tom are witnesses to a murder. May almost hangs for it; it is luck, including the good fortune of having a conscientious lawyer assigned to his case, that rescues him. Tom becomes an accessory to the murder, and later uncovers it to get revenge.

Class was a huge part of English life, and it clearly comes through, but Clark resists taking a romantic view of it. Tom is not virtuous because or in spite of his poverty. He is a wily and unscrupulous denizen of a corrupt world. May is a professional who ostensibly has the most to gain from the social changes occurring, but deeply damaged and almost destroyed by the highs and lows of a society in flux. His lawyer, Sydney Rose, is the scion of an impoverished peerage. He is motivated by his hopes to move up in society as much as by any sense of noblesse oblige. His victory is due as much to luck and determination.

The pace of the book is slow compared to other thrillers of mysteries. The book is as much about May and Tom coping with a changing world as it is about murder mystery. It tempo picks up in the final chapters as Rose begins to put together a defense for May.

Overall, it is an enjoyable book. It works in its combination of history, mainstream fiction, mystery and picturing of a world that is rapidly changing through new technology.

(If you're interested in the history of the great London sewer project, see this review of Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury.)

Order this book here.

Duel with the Devil by Paul Collins

The body of a young woman, Elma Sands, was found in a well outside of Manhattan on the second day of 1800. A carpenter who boarded in her family’s house, some suggested he was her secret lover, was immediately accused. The case led to one of the first sensationalized, broadly followed murder trials in the young United States. Paul Collins recounts the events in Duel with the Devil.

The carpenter, Levi Weeks, might well have been convicted of the crime had he not had a legal dream team with the competence to show the weakness of the prosecution case and suggest an alternate explanation for Sand’s death. That is one of the interesting things about his trial. His defense team consisted of political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr along with their fellow Revolutionary War veteran Brockhurst Livingston.

The political and legal elite of New York state, and especially Manhattan, of those days was close knit and often resulted in odd combinations. Hamilton and Burr were both in debt to Weeks’ brother Ezra, a prominent builder, which may explain their participation.

Weeks was found not guilty after what was considered a very long trial for the time, mainly due to the great number of prosecution witnesses. Sands’ murder was never properly solved.

She was probably killed by another roomer in her house, Richard Croucher. He had fled England to escape the insane asylum after his behavior led him trouble and criminal charges. Shortly after Weeks’ trial, he was convicted of raping his 13-year old stepdaughter. He was released after three years on the agreement that he would leave the country. He went to Virginia instead, where he fleeced the merchants of Richmond. It appears he eventually made his way back to England, where he continued criminality led to his execution.

Hamilton and Burr famously faced declines. They dueled and Hamilton died from the wound he received. Their co-counsel fared better; Livingston went on to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Weeks left Manhattan. We worked his way west and became a successful builder in Natchez.

Collins’ book reads almost like a novel. It is interesting, quick-reading history.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Defining Noah Webster by K. Alan Snyder

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Triumvirate by Bruce Chadwick

Collins, Paul. Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton & Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery. New York: Crown, 2013.

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Meltzer, Brad. The Book of Lies. New York: Grand Central, 2008.
ISBN-13: 978-0-446-57788-5
ISBN-10: 0-446-57788-X

The Book of Lies is a thriller that brings together the ancient, the old and the present. The old and the present are tied to a gun that injures a man today and killed a man in 1932. These events are also linked to a search for an ancient book, God’s mark, or reward, to Cain for repenting of his brother’s murder.

The 1932 killing was of Mitchell Siegel. He was the father of Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman. It’s true that Mitchell died during a robbery of a shop, officially of a heart attack, though family history is divided over whether this is true or whether he was shot by the robber. For the fictional tale author Brad Meltzer goes with the shooting. The fictional version of Jerry hides clues to his father’s murder, and the secret he died to protect, in an early version of Superman.

The characters are drawn into finding the clues in Superman when one is shot by the same gun that killed Mitchell Siegel. He is an ex-con and the protagonist is his son, a disgraced former customs agent. They barely stay ahead of the others who are seeking them or Cain’s book, federal agents, occultists and rivals in there own camp.



That Cain murdered Abel is from the Bible. Beyond that, Meltzer’s version of the story owes more to the occult than the Bible and may be largely from the author’s imagination. Of course, the biblical account doesn’t leave much room for a modern-day thriller.

The events surrounding the death of Jerry Siegel’s father are fictional, too, though this recent history is treated with more care. Siegel has surviving family, including his wife, and co-created the most well recognized character in comics, a medium for which Meltzer writes.

I’ll admit I’m not especially a fan of thrillers. I was drawn to this book by the Siegel connection. I found the book to be entertaining with plenty of action.

Case Closed (Vol. 2) by Gosho Ayoama

Gosho Ayoama. Case Closed. Vol. 2. 1994. San Francisco: VIZ, 2004.

Case Closed is a collection of short detective stories in comic form (manga). They were originally published in Japan under the title “Meitantei Conan” (Detective Conan). That is the straightforward part.

The hero is a teenager with a genius for solving crime, Jimmy Kudo. He stumbles onto something and a crime organization poisons him. Instead of killing him, the drug shrinks him down to the size of a first grader. He commits himself to finding the men who did it. To protect himself and his friends for the criminals who think he is dead, he takes on the name Conan Edogawa (from mystery authors Conan Doyle and Rumpo Edogawa) and takes up with his unsuspecting girlfriend, Rachel, and her father, mediocre private investigator Richard Moore. To get this back-story, you’ll need to read the first volume or see early episodes of the anime series that closely follows the manga.



Other than that, the stories are straightforward tales of ratiocination in the Western tradition started by Edgar Allen Poe and taken up so well by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. For someone interested in getting familiar with manga, Japanese comics, this may be a good place to start. The mystery story is familiar to Westerners and the art is in the manga style.

This particular volume has three stories. Gosho Ayoama’s method is to present a complete mystery story and occasionally include stories that touch on Jimmy’s broader quest to return to his normal size and bring his shrinkers to justice. You don’t have to be invested in the larger story to enjoy reading the individual mysteries.

Though Jimmy appears to be a young child, and has adventures with kids from his elementary school class, the stories are not for children. There is murder and other crimes, violence and gore, and children in imminent danger. Conan has a particular knack for provoking killers into coming after him.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (audio book)

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Random House, 2006)

Audio book read by Dennis Boutsikaris

This is the story of the trial of two men for the murder of Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Ada, Oklahoma. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were convicted of a crime they did not commit, and the justice system consumed more than a decade of their lives before minimally correcting its error.

I’m not surprised it took so long to overturn the convictions of these men. I’m surprised it got so far to begin with. The police investigation was very incomplete and shoddy, even for 30 years ago when technology and science played a much lesser role in collecting and analyzing evidence (Grisham strongly suggests the Ada police had ties to drug dealer, including one of the detectives on the case, and that influenced the investigation). The lawyers for the defense were competent, but they were not supplied with the means to mount a good defense for their poor clients. Williamson was clearly mentally ill, but there was never a proper determination of his fitness to stand trial. The evidence was so thin I’m surprised a trial was permitted. They even let a former Ada police chief sit on the jury (admittedly, he was not forthcoming during jury selection, but you would think someone in that small town would have known or pressed the issue more).

I can understand the thirst for answers, especially in a small community where a violent crime captures the public attention. It reminds me of the 2005 conviction here in central Missouri of Ryan Ferguson for the of journalist Kent Heitholt in 2001, when Ferguson was still in high school. The conviction rested on some uncertain eyewitness accounts, possibly influenced by police and prosecutors, and the confession Charles Erickson. There seems to be little evidence against Erickson except his drug-induced loss of memories of the night of the crime. He took a plea bargain to testify against Ferguson. As with Williamson, police and courts seemed to pay little attention to the mental state of Erickson.

In spite of the lack of evidence to back up the witnesses few, in my mind Erickson is a very sketchy witness even to his own involvement, the jury convicted Ferguson. People wanted answers, order, justice, and a sense that the issue was resolved so they could return to a safe life. This made them blind to all the problems with the case against Ferguson. The police felt those public pressures and were too ready to go with a problematic case rather than go through a tough investigation that might lead to no answers. The case had other problems, and as people began to admit to false confessions and prosecutorial influence of witnesses, the conviction was revisited and overturned in 2013, after Ferguson had spent most of his 20s in prison.

I think our justice system is often close to the mark and produces mostly good results. However, it should not take years, or decades, to correct such problematic cases as these. In fact, these cases should have never come to trial based on such flimsy evidence.

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Moore, Graham. The Sherlockian. New York: Twelve, 2010.

In The Sherlockian, Graham Moore tells two stories, both crime tales that are linked by a missing diary. In the modern story, a newly inducted member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a prominent group of Sherlock Holmes fan-scholars, sets out to solve a murder that occurs at a convention of the Irregulars. Seeking the solution to this mystery leads him to another, the attempt to find a lost diary of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes.

The second story is historical. It features Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Doyle similarly starts out to solve one mystery and gets draw into another. He sets out to discover who sent him a letter bomb that actually contains a letter, though Doyle narrowly escapes death from the bomb. It leads him into seeking the killer of young women who are joined by radical politics and an odd tattoo.

The first track reads as much like a suspense-thriller than a mystery, though the hero is decidedly nerdier than is typical of such stories, as you might expect of a guy who has had is head buried in books for years. The Doyle story begins as something similar to the stories the actual man wrote to showcase his famous character, the fictional detective
he killed to be rid of then brought back to life. It becomes more realistic at progress, or at least much messier.

Though mostly serious in tone, the book has humorous moments. The hero is a guy who has found a way to make a living from having read a ton of books. His chief credential as a detective is that he knows a lot about Sherlock Holmes. He’s not the only Sherlockian to involve himself in the case; he is simply more competent and lucky than the others.



The historical touches are interesting. The real Doyle consulted with Scotland Yard, with varying success, though the crime described in The Sherlockian is fictional. Some of his papers, including a diary, disappeared after his death and resurfaced more than 70 years later in the hands of a distant Doyle relative. A battle of words and lawyers ensued involving the would-be seller of these documents, the Doyle heirs, and a prominent Irregular. The Irregular died under suspicious circumstances and the case is still considered unsolved in spite of the efforts of police and many amateur detectives. These real events inspired the book, though the author clearly distinguishes in a short note the touch of history from the mass of fiction.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
The Great Stink by Clare Clark

How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork

OCork, Shannon. How to Write Mysteries. Cincinnati, OH: Writers’ Digest Books, 1989.

How to Write Mysteries is a quick summary of writing crime novels from start to finish. It doesn’t deal much with what it’s going to take to get you to set down and do it, but it is full of advice on what make mysteries work.

To OCork, a mystery is a like a game you play with your readers. A mystery novel is puzzle and the reader is trying to solve it by figuring out who committed the crime, typically murder. The writer must play fair by providing all the clues needed to figure it out, but at the same time provide an interesting story that obfuscates and distracts.

OCork speaks of this in terms of the real story and the apparent story. The real story is the solving of the mystery. The apparent story is all the stuff the characters must go through, some directly related to unraveling the crime and some tangential, to accomplish it.



The book deals with the mechanics of writing a mystery novel: types of mysteries, plot development, style, character development, pace, dialogue and more. It also covers what to do after you've written your book: manuscript preparation, submitting to publishers and starting your next book.

OCork uses examples throughout to illustrate her point. Some come from published works, but many come from a story she makes up for the purpose of illustration. It’s not a novel, but it does illustrate how one thing builds on another, from plot to the full story. Using this common example shows how everything ties together.

In one chapter, OCork addresses the writer’s life. It is a lot of work. If you’re making a living as a writer, or hoping to, it is your work. That means making the sacrifices needed to do the work you want, but also enjoying the fruit of it.

Best of What I Read in 2013

Each year I like to select the top 20 percent of the books I read for special attention. Though 2013 is a few months behind, I’d still like to highlight the books I read in that year that are most noteworthy.

1. Second Kings

2. Revelation

3. The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron

4. The Purloined Letter and The Murder on the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe

5. Return of the Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

6. My Antonia by Willa Cather

7. The Postman by David Brin

Other annual best-of lists:

Best of What I Read in 2012

Best of What I Read in 2011

Best of What I Read in 2010

Best of What I Read in 2009

Best of What I Read in 2008
Best of What I Read in 2007

Other best-of lists:

Top 15 Books Reviewed So Far