This famous book by Wilkie Collins has now been consumed on the kindle, as first advertised at reference 1. Written around 1860, about 25 years before Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene, read because I thought it was the modern detective story, an honour I now find accorded to his other and later famous book, 'The Moonstone', perhaps because the earlier story, while involving detection, does not involve a detective.
The story is organised as a series of narratives, telling various parts of the story from various different points of view. A device much emulated since, but one which I found a little irritating most of the time, but which worked in the near closing confession by the posh foreign gentleman (villain No.2) - a closing confession which very much took the place of the little lecture at the end of the story by Agatha's Poirot. I also found the narrative rather long winded and could have done with the whole being a good deal shorter. Maybe this mattered less in the days of serial publication, when one consumed a few pages a week rather than a lot of pages a day.
The props on which the story are built are very much of their time.
The beautiful, fragile and virginal young girl, in love with her drawing master, who is held to her engagement to an English gentleman (villain No.1) contracted by her dead father. Her guardian fails to do his duty and is generally set up as an example of very decayed and decrepit gentry stock.
Carried off to villain No.1's lair in Hampshire where, short of the readies, he tries to get his paws on her money, carefully tied up by her family solicitors. Married womens' property clearly an important issue at the time. Not to mention protection of wives from abusive husbands.
In conjunction with villain No. 2, his wife is swapped for her double, previously confined to a private asylum. Double conveniently dies, wife is installed in asylum in her place and declared dead on the evidence of the dead double. Villain No.1 gets his paws on the readies, under the terms of his wife's will, and villain No.2 gets his share. Would never have happened once DNA was on the scene.
Plot thickened by villain No.1 having a dark secret, which must at all costs be kept secret. He had already, for many years, been paying a stipend to the mother of the double on this account. A secret which would have been much harder for him to pull off once the General Register Office had got under way.
Drawing master returns from an expedition to the jungle and, after many torments and trials, sorts it all out, with vital support from the heroine's devoted sister. Or perhaps half-sister. Hardly a policeman to be seen at all, although the lawyers do rather better.
Walk on role towards the end for sundry dastardly foreign spies, agents and plotters, with which, given the nationalisms of various sorts which were then gripping the peripheries of the empires of Russia, Austria and the Turk, one presumes that the London of the time swarmed.
Despite my opening remarks, very much a whodunnit, recognisably of the same genre as that of the great Agatha. One wanted, despite the thick prose, to know how it all worked out. But a more genteel tale in that, while there is villainy, murder is not part of the story proper, although villain No.2 is tidied up at the end - and with his naked body being publicly exhibited in the Paris Morgue, the custom, it seems of that place and time. And, furthermore, not deterred by the long winded prose, next stop 'The Moonstone'.
PS: slightly puzzled in that the General Register Office was up and running well before this novel was written. Maybe it took some years before the inspection facilities which I knew in the 1970's were up and running. It seems unlikely that Collins would not have known of it.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/flou.html.
Reference 2: read all about it at https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=paris+morgue.
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