One of the most fascinating aspects of Andrew Pepper's series of Georgian/Victorian crime novels featuring Pyke (no first name), is the charting of the early days of modern policing in London. When he started out, in The Last Days of Newgate, Pyke was a Bow Street Runner, balancing his career in the nascent service with a sideline in private detection that helped him stray across the line of criminality.
Fourteen years and three novels later, in 1843, Pyke has joined The Detective Branch, the newly formed forerunner to the modern CID and is leading a small band of criminal investigation pioneers based at Scotland Yard taking on enquiries into serious crime in the capital. Working under Pyke is no less a personage than Jack Whicher, who some years later was the most celebrated of London's detectives enjoying the sort of profile that might now be reserved for footballers. His real life detection was the subject of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale's astonishingly good true crime book.
On one level, Pyke is just about as ill-suited to police work as chocolate is to tea-pot manufacturing. He is an awkward, temperamental and violent man just as likely to take the law into his own hands as he is to haul an offender down the nick. In a department dominated by the establishment, he is an outsider, a former guttersnipe who even did time for non payment of debts. But for all his problems Pyke is a man of honesty and integrity, a detective who takes police work seriously for the motives most of us would like from our coppers: to bring justice to victims and to bring criminals to justice. And for Pyke the law applies equally to all: to politicians, priests and police just as to thieves and killers.
It is this inflexibility that proves the driving force behind the narrative of ther novel. When the rector of a wealthy city parish is found murdered in his churchyard, all the signs point to the guilt of an ex-con oddjobman employed by the church who was seen by witnesses looking over the corpse. HIs superiors pressurise Pyke to hunt down the suspect and close the case, but the stubborn detective is sure that there is a lot more to the killing than meets the eye and embarks on an investigation that drags in senior churchmen, police officers, City of London officials and welthy businessman.
It becomes clear very quickly that Pyke's detective work presents a danger to many of these august individuals and as a consequence is also a danger to himself and his career. In the nest of vipers that is Scotland Yard in 1843 he does not even know if he can count on the support of his subordinates, including Whicher, the most talented and reliable of his men.
This is a novel of police and political corruption, of greed and social schism. It is also a very strong mystery that holds its secret tight until the end of the novel. And it is a revealing journey into police and social history. A friend I lent Pepper's first novel to did not enjoy because he claimed it was historically flawed. I reminded him that this is fiction, and that to me - without the benefit of my friend's more comprehensive historical education - the book carried the atmosphere of authenticity. It felt right.
The Detective Branch does too. It conveys the sound and stench of 1840s London and the criminal claustrophibia of the rookeries. It also holds the promise of the great Victorian wealth revolution - that the time of men of ingenuity, initiative and ambition - and perhaps moral ambiguity - is coming.
This is the third of the four Pyke novels I have read - I somehow missed one in the middle - and it is by far the most accomplished. I like Pyke and his professional pride and determination mixed with his personal awkwardness and the demons that lie beneath that threaten his career, family and life whenever they erupt through the surface. This is a series I thought had lost its way with book two, The Revenge of Captain Paine, but it is firmly back on track and I look forward to the further adventures of Detective Pyke.
