VICTORIAN NOIR
Steven Price brings a poet’s touch, intensive research to rich period novel
Early in 2012, Victoria poet Steven Price sat down at his laptop and wrote the opening words of a new novel.
“He was the oldest son. He wore his black moustaches long in the manner of an outlaw and his right thumb hooked at his hip where a Colt Navy should have hung …”
At that point, Price wasn’t sure where he was going. “But there was a kind of momentum in the writing,” he says now. “It just took off.”
But in no way did he expect to end up with a novel like By Gaslight, a massive piece of Victorian noir that totals 230,000 words. Neither did he expect it to trigger bidding wars internationally.
“I don’t want to belabour the point, but in the process of writing it, I had no idea it would receive such a favourable response,” Price says.
Indeed he was surprised he’d managed to complete a first draft by the summer of 2014. “There were extended periods when exhaustion or despair just got in the way, and I would stop writing for three months at a time.”
But throughout the writing and rewriting, that opening paragraph remained — the one that introduces the reader to legendary U.S. private detective William Pinkerton and the sinister fogshrouded London of 1885.
The novel’s action would also move to the diamond mines of South Africa and the bloody battlefields of the U.S. Civil War. But it’s London that dominates, and here its 40-year-old author brings a poet’s touch to the period atmosphere: “Fog spilled over the cobblestones, foul and yellow and thick with coal fumes and a bitter stink that crusted the nostrils, scalded the back of the throat …”
Some of Price’s anxieties had stemmed from his decision to tell the story from the alternating perspectives of two key characters. He suddenly realized that because of this device, the story was taking twice as long to tell.
“At that point I had suspicions that the book was going to be big — but nowhere did I expect it was going to be 230,000 words.”
He worried it might never find a publisher. His wife, award-winning novelist Esi Edugyan (Half Blood Blues), encouraged him to persevere.
Chatting in the office of his Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, Price tries to be laid back about the commotion By Gaslight created within the book industry. His lucrative deal with high-profile U.S. publisher Farrar, Strauss & Giroux aroused the curiosity of the trade publication Publishers Weekly, which reported it was in the six-figure range.
Price won’t talk about the particulars of that sale or any other, “But it was a shock,” he laughs. “I’m a poet, so the idea of people publishing anything I do was very surprising.” He’s not even sure at this point how many countries have now purchased By Gaslight. “I think there are seven or eight,” he says casually.
He wears his success lightly. “We have two small children at home — so everything else gets pushed into the background.”
Price’s previous writings include the 2006 Anatomy of Keys, which he describes as “a poetic biography” of escape artist Harry Houdini, and the 2011 Into That Darkness, an novel about an earthquake that hits the British Columbia coast.
By Gaslight demanded his most intensive research so far. Price was constantly checking an 1882 London atlas to ensure his street names were correct, and it was part of a day’s work to ensure he got the design of a hansom cab right. But he ultimately brought his own imagination to bear on Victorian London.
“You still have to keep the facts accurate. But this is my Victorian London. It’s not the real London.”
Price presents a London in which mysterious figures vanish into the fog, in which a severed head can be found in the Thames and the rest of the body miles away in Edgeware Road, in which a U.S. detective named William Pinkerton can continue his obsessive search for an elusive criminal named Edward Shade.
The real-life William Pinkerton, the driven scion of a legendary detective agency, has long fascinated Price.
“He was a tortured fellow … a man who was tough, who believed the end always justified the means, who had all the talents and abilities of a master criminal but found himself, through accident of family, on the right side of the law.”
The roots of Pinkerton’s obsession with Shade provide some of the novel’s most compelling moments. And Shade becomes an unseen figure of almost mythic proportions — reminiscent of the frightening Keyser Soze in the film The Usual Suspects.
In preparing his manuscript for publication, Price worked with legendary Canadian editor Ellen Seligman, whose death earlier this year was widely mourned.
“Ellen was amazing. She was an intuitive editor, a rigorous editor. But she never pushed her own thumbprint into it.”
The editing process provided an ironic footnote to his fears about length. “I sigh over the length, but I wanted the book to be digressive. I didn’t just want to tell a straightforward tale — I wanted to get into the unswept corners of the room. So there was this constant tug-of-war between a digression and a forward-moving book. We ended up reducing it by 20- to 30,000 words — but ended up adding 50- to 60,000 words. So the book got longer while also getting tighter. A very strange experience!”