Historical detective stories are enjoying a renaissance at the moment, and among the most welcome recent additions to the genre was MJ Carter’s 2014 debut, The Strangler Vine, a novel that proved both its literary and commercial credentials by being shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s New Blood Dagger award and longlisted for the Baileys women’s prize. In The Infidel Stain, her “private enquiry agents”, Jeremiah Blake and William Avery, are back for their second outing, returned from their postings with the East India Company to a fog-shrouded London blighted by poverty, political unrest and violent murder.
It’s 1841, four years into the new queen’s reign, and Avery, promoted to captain after a stint in the Afghan wars, has returned to England at his wife’s behest, only to find married life still won’t run smoothly and the routine of a Devonshire landowner lacking in adventure. So, naturally, he jumps at a summons to London from Blake to assist in a private investigation into the gruesome murder of two disreputable printers, which London’s new police force seems inclined to ignore. Blake has been commissioned to look into the matter by Lord Allington, a philanthropic peer prone to fits of melancholy and in thrall to his pious sister.
At first, it appears that the dead men were linked by their distribution of pornography, but another murder points to possible political connections and Blake and Avery find themselves drawn into the warring factions of 19th-century radical politics, just as it becomes clear that people in high places will stop at nothing to block the investigation.
The “infidels” of the title were a particular kind of atheist freethinkers, whose revolutionary ideas have, by the 1840s, been superseded by the more modest demands of the Chartists. Even among the Chartists there are divisions, between those who advocate the use of force and those who preach temperance and piety. The debate over the reform of suffrage is one of the most pressing concerns of the age and it is a testament to Carter’s skill as both storyteller and historian that she marshals this immensely complex material and incorporates it into a murder mystery without allowing the pace to flag.
She portrays the conditions of the poor in unsparing detail; most poignant, perhaps, are the implicit parallels with our own age. “How else do you explain how the well-fed, rich men of parliament can so basely and brazenly deny the needs of those who suffer so visibly before them on the streets of London?” asks the radical printer Richard Carlile, one of several real historical figures fictionalised here.
The relationship between Blake and Avery grows deeper and more nuanced in this book and even if it is transparently a Holmes and Watson dynamic – Avery the sensible, practical narrator; Blake the brilliant, mercurial, opium-eating master of disguise – it’s no less enjoyable for that, perhaps because it’s so reassuringly familiar. The Infidel Stain is a richly detailed and smartly plotted novel that firmly establishes Carter as an authentic voice in the world of historical crime.
The Infidel Stain is published by Fig Tree (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.24
