Book review: Blood-soaked Victorian thrills

“The children are taken far away, after the fire, and they are given new names.” So begins the prologue to this fast-paced spoof-Victorian novel. 

It is 1872 and a group of children, their burns, still blistered and weeping, are given new names, all birds, by the master as they stand in a school assembly.

Afterwards, we observe a clever girl now named Nightingale, who is friends with two lively cockney boys, Finch and Magpie. 

Together they vow to find out where and what this new place is, who the men in charge are — the Choirmaster, the Proctor, the Dean — and why they have been brought here after the fire in the orphan asylum.

The main story begins in 1894. Inspector Henry Cutter of Scotland Yard, and Sergeant Gideon Bliss keep an appointment in Millwall with an armourer who is to supply Bliss with a suitable handgun. 

Bliss is retching due to “the terrible stench of putrefaction that had assailed Gideon even a hundred yards from the gate”. 

His host explains that it was the stench of “batshit”, guano from Peru, that caused the sergeant to lose his breakfast.

Readers of The House on Vesper Sands, O’Donnell’s hugely successful 2019 novel, will already be familiar with this classic detective duo. 

Inspector Cutter, a stickler with a famously short temper and a terrifying way with words, is one of Scotland Yard’s finest, while Sergeant Bliss, a former Cambridge divinity student, is a mere 13 months in the job. 

He is clumsy, badly dressed, nervously verbose, and extremely unfit. Cutter has a low opinion of Gideon Bliss and seldom misses an opportunity to tell him so.

The story is told mainly from Gideon’s point of view. He is often challenged by Cutter’s daily routine, which proceeds at breakneck pace. 

Bliss has noticed Cutter’s new state of high anxiety, hence the need for Bliss’ handgun, but he does not know why it has evolved.

Neither does the reader, but it hardly matters given the detective duo’s fast-moving progress through the colourful characters and street-life of Victorian London. 

Cutter frequents Leggett’s Fine Wines and Viands, a Soho eating house, which is “the nearest thing he had to a regular place of business”.

An elegant young Frenchman called Milo, whom they met at the armoury, joins Cutter and Bliss at Leggett’s. 

He is wearing a suit of pale grey wool, with a violet satin waistcoat: “He looked as if he belonged in one of the more turbulent epistolary novels.” 

He is apparently a spy, and takes them in a cab to the scene of the first murder. 

In fact, there are two victims: a retired civil servant, a CBE who breeds orchids, and his manservant, both killed by a knife with surgical precision.

More corpses follow, all men of a certain age in powerful positions, skilfully despatched by knife.

The case is unusually hard to crack, so Bliss is sent to ask for help with archival research from Octavia Hillingdon, a journalist from a wealthy background who aspires to cover more interesting topics than society gossip.

All that Cutter can tell her is that “Men are being killed over some wrong that was done long ago. It was a wrong that cannot be righted, and a wrong that cannot be forgotten.”

The story builds towards a dramatic finale in the recently-opened Natural History Museum. The tension is eased by Octavia’s growing fondness for Bliss, which seems to signal a sequel. 

This is a highly entertaining novel, but its graphic descriptions of nauseating smells, blood-soaked corpses, the under-age prostitutes, and maltreated children of Victorian London are not for the faint-hearted.