The Incendiary's Trail
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First edition hardback cover
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| Author | James McCreet |
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| Illustrator | gray318 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Publisher | Macmillan New Writing (United Kingdom) |
| Pages | 304 (UK hardback) |
| ISBN | 978-0-230-73627-6 |
| OCLC | 318671604 |
| Followed by | The Vice Society, The Thieves’ Labyrinth |
The Incendiary’s Trail is the debut novel from writer James McCreet, first published in July 2009. It is a Victorian detective thriller set in 1840s London and introduces a series of characters that recur in successive books.
Plot summary
The book begins with the grisly murder of a conjoined (‘Siamese’) twin who is part of a travelling freak show. Investigating the crime is Sergeant George Williamson, a member of the newly formed Metropolitan Police Detective Force. However, when police regulations prevent Williamson from investigating the crime as freely as he might, a suspected criminal is recruited by the detective’s superior, Inspector Albert Newsome. The investigation leads the policeman and their new recruit to a blackmailer and arsonist (or ‘incendiary’ in the language of the time) who – unknown to the policemen – knows their unwilling ‘volunteer’ personally and has scores to settle. The story has a number of murders – one of them a classic ‘locked-room’ mystery – and also some large set pieces, including a public hanging, a masked ball and a balloon chase.
Fact and fiction
The book is based in a very specific time and place and there is some question about how much is historical and how much purely fictional. The author has written: “A sense of realism is important. I limited myself to primary sources: books, articles and periodicals written at that time. What I like about those sources is their unreliability and ambiguity – I would read three different eye-witness accounts of an incident and receive three different versions of the facts. What was the truth? We’ll never know.”[1]
McCreet also points out that much of what is factually historical proved unusable: “As I read through contemporary newspapers, I came across numerous stories so amazing that I wouldn’t have dared to use them. Nobody would have believed them.”
The fact remains that many of the places and institutions are real, though they may have since vanished. These include Newgate and Giltspur Street prisons (now gone), Vauxhall Gardens (also gone), Haymarket, St Giles’ church, and Hyde Park (all still around). The Detective Force also was real and created in 1842,[2] while the only real person in the book is Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne, although his activity in the book is entirely fictionalised.
It is suspected that Sergeant Williamson is loosely based on the real Victorian detective Jack Whicher. The description of both characters is very similar.[3] There are also some other interesting parallels in the character’s name. A murder case of 1811, documented famously by Thomas De Quincey,[4] involved a case in which the victim was called Wilson and the murderer called Williams, while Edgar Allan Poe (one of McCreet’s main influences[5]) has a short story called “William Wilson” in which a man is plagued by a double of himself.
Sequel and series
The Incendiary’s Trail is the first in a series featuring the same characters and location. It is followed by The Vice Society (2010) and The Thieves' Labyrinth (2011).[6]
References
- ↑ http://www.jamesmccreet.co.uk
- ↑ Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police by JF Moylan, 1929
- ↑ The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
- ↑ Postscript to Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts by Thomas de Quincey, 1854
- ↑ http://www.jamesmccreet.co.uk
- ↑ http://www.jamesmccreet.co.uk
