April 24, 09.32am
There is always a danger in assessing a debut novel that the reviewer is too willing for the writer to succeed, too hopeful perhaps that what they have in their hands is the only chapter of a glittering career, perhaps a trifle reluctant to put the boot in if necessary.
I felt this keenly when a proof of Andrew Pepper's first novel, The Last Days of Newgate dropped through the letterbox. It appeared as if this book would stimulate most of my sweet spots. It is set in 1829 - a fascinating era socially, politically, economically, criminally. It promised "high intrigue and low politics" and a reluctant and unusual hero. I wanted to like it.
The sine qua non of the historical novel is a convincing depiction of a the era in which it is set. It needn't be authentic necessarily - Pepper himself admits in his post-script that authenticity is all but impossible - but it needs to feel like it is. And this is Pepper's greatest achievement in The Last Days of Newgate does. He creates a vision of London for 1829 so atmospheric that it is almost possible to feel the fog enveloping your face, to smell the stench from the gutters and feel the danger in the rookeries. The despair of the wretched drink-addled, starving inhabitants of those rookeries reminded me of the London found by the novelist Jack London when he went underground in the East End more than 70 years later to research conditions there. (His findings of disease and poverty and exploitation were chillingly recounted in The People of the Abyss.)
This is the world occupied by Pyke, Pepper's reluctant hero, a man of many contradictions (aren't all the best fictional detectives?) who is both thief and policeman (a Bow Street Runner no less) as well as innkeeper and philosopher. He is clever, sensitive and thoughtful but quick to violence, and so, well-suited to the anarchic underbelly of a society constantly on the edge of tipping over into mayhem.
Pyke's role as a Bow Street Runner collides with his sideline as a private detective for a wealthy aristocrat when a suspect he is following for the latter leads him into a scene of unspeakable brutality and cruelty: the murder of a young Irish family in one of London's most notorious rookeries.
Pyke's investigation into the slayings carry him through both the extremes of London society - opera with the wealthy, bear-baiting with the working poor - and also puts him at the heart of the two most explosive political issues of the day: Catholic emancipation and police reform.
None of this journey ever feels like the work of a debutant novelist, there is scarcely a word out of place until a somewhat helter-skelter ending seems to get away just a little from Pepper.
But that barely detracts from a terrific and pacy read, from a brilliant debut full of great promise. Pepper's characters are as convincing as his places, and in Pyke, from whom more is expected he has a compelling and fascinating hero who could do for pre-Victorian London what Sharpe did for the Napoleonic Wars. If you like historical crime fiction, you'll love this.
The Last Days of Newgate by Andrew Pepper will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on July 6.
