By his own measure he feared no man living and only one man dead and that man was his father." William's abraded knuckles never quite heal, since he always seems to be fresh off of pummeling someone. "In America there was not a thief who did not fear him. And his grandiose reputation spans the globe. He's Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole for the gaslight era, embodying the requisite triad of character-defining traits for the postmodern detective hero: world weariness, barely controlled machismo and an aching, underlying sensitivity. Still reeling from the recent death of his dominating father, 39-year-old William Pinkerton shows himself as something of a brute with heart.
She is identified as Charlotte Reckitt, a longtime member of the "flash scene," the city's teeming underground of shills, pickpockets and grifters. Violence forever stalks the margins of the story, and we are privy to situations that that are both raw and beautiful, though always expressing the complexities of the human heart.īy Gaslight kicks off in London, in February 1885: A woman's battered head has washed up on the bank of the Thames. Spinning fiction out of fact, Price creates an evocative world, cast not in shades of stark black and white, but rather in morally complex herringbone. Pinkerton's legacy serves as the jumping off point for a high energy drama starring his son, a second-generation detective named William Pinkerton, who has taken over the business after the death of his father. I found myself returning to passages not only because I occasionally lost the thread of this historical mystery's manifold plots, sub-plots and asides, but because I wanted to revisit the somber music of the telling.Ĭhicago-based Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famous (some would say infamous) detective agency that bore his name, has been a fixture of Civil War-era fiction and non-fiction alike. By Gaslight, the second novel by award-winning Canadian poet Steven Price, proves engrossing enough to warrant its forest-depleting bulk. Readers may approach a doorstop novel of some 700-plus pages with a mixture of hope and dread: hope that the tome will offer a tale to relish, dread from being betrayed one too many times.
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