[Review] E.S. Thomson: 'Under Ground'

Finally, I had the book in my hands: the seventh adventure of Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain. In this installment, Flockhart and Quartermain are called to a house of ill-repute owned by the well-known Mrs Roseplucker. There, a client has been murdered. The face of the corpse has a look of mortal terror, and its throat has been slashed like a frenzied animal has been at work. Jobber, an employee of the house, is arrested by the police because 'if he isn't guilty of this crime, he will sure be guilty of another'. Keen to keep the establishment’s 'reputation' for discretion, Mrs Roseplucker asks the pair for help. It turns out that the victim is Edward Mortmain, the heir to the family fortune, which has largely been accumulated via rents from the dilapidated Prior's Rents.

Jobber is surely going to be found guilty of a crime he did not commit and our intrepid duo are therefore hurled into a race against time. Flockhart and Quartermain are also tasked with finding the murderer by Henry Mortmain*, the ailing, but perfectly sane patriarch of the family. Throughout the family history, a giant rat features heavily. It is reputed to always kill the heir. Remember, Edward Mortmain was the heir.

Meanwhile, Will has taken on a commission to investigate the crumbling sewer system below London. Unwittingly, he's on the trail of another notorious killer: cholera. London was a city overwhelmed by the human excrement of its ever-growing population in the squalor of overcrowded slums, such as Prior's Rents. Human waste piled up in courtyards and overflowed from cesspits into the gutters and waterways. The River Thames had become London's largest open sewer.

I have always known that Elaine Thomson could evoke the sensations of decay, stink, and other malodorous substances that covered Victorian London in the mid 1850s better than anyone else, but in this novel she has reached a new level, worthy of a Grand Mistress, in describing the fetid atmosphere that you had to endure if you lived in London.

Rats – I hate them now even more than I ever did before – feature both above and underground, and their effect was like Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Hound of the Baskerville'. Always lurking in the shade. Always menacing.

'Under Ground' is a masterpiece of gothic suspense, crime, slime, and grime. Publishers so often put the word 'unputdownable' on the cover of their books that it lost virtually all meaning. This one, however, is guaranteed to be unputdownable. I promise.

* Mortmain ('dead hand') is also the perpetual, inalienable ownership of real estate by a corporation or legal institution.