Gripping tale paints dark, vivid picture
TORONTO — 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 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 actually 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 fog-shrouded 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. So he laboured on — in pursuit of his goal to write the kind of book he himself would enjoy reading.
Chatting in the office of his Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, Price tries to be laid back about the commotion created within the book industry. His lucrative deal with high-profile U.S. publisher Farrar, Strauss & Giroux quickly aroused the curiosity of the trade publication
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 “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 which he describes as “a poetic biography” of escape artist Harry Houdini, and the 2011 a novel about an earthquake that hits the British Columbia coast. Not surprisingly, 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
In preparing his manuscript for publication, Price worked with legendary Canadian editor Ellen Seligman, whose passing earlier this year was widely mourned.
“Ellen was amazing,” he remembers. “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 the fears about length that Price experienced while actually writing
“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 Steven Price McClelland & Stewart Allan Pinkerton started his eponymous detective agency in Chicago in 1850. He also headed the Union Intelligence Service during the Civil War. In his second novel,
Victoria writer Steven Price focuses on Allan’s son William who, with his brother Robert, took over the business in 1884.
On a foundation of history, Price builds layers of fiction to create a riveting novel that is hard to put down — except I had to at times because of the sheer weight of the book. But not for long.
At the beginning of the novel, William Pinkerton is in Victorian London looking for a criminal who had eluded his father, which leads him to a former collaborator, Charlotte Reckitt. But the night he finds Charlotte, she jumps off the Blackfriars Bridge into the Thames and disappears.
Pinkerton isn’t the only one getting tighter. A very strange experience!” looking for her. Another is a criminal from Charlotte’s past. He hasn’t seen her for years, but it’s clear they once meant much to each other.
Price does a fabulous job of describing the criminal underworld, where poverty often leads to law-breaking simply to survive. Violence pervades the lives of the characters, but there are also moments of tenderness.
To gaslight people means to manipulate them so they think they are going crazy. In the criminal world, appearance and reality are often confused on purpose to manipulate those who have, into losing what they have.
The criminals gaslight their dupes. And Price certainly gaslights readers — with much more success.
The atmosphere of Victorian London with its intense fogs and utter filth fits the confusion and mystery that drives the plot. The details of setting are exacting, and Price evokes all the senses to describe them. His attention to detail makes it easy to picture the scenes and in some cases impossible to forget them.