We are delighted to announce that we have signed the twelfth book in J. C. Briggs’ Charles Dickens Investigations, an intriguing literary detective series set in Victorian London.
Here, J. C. Briggs tells us what to expect from the latest instalment:
“I’m so pleased that Sapere Books are publishing my twelfth Charles Dickens mystery, Death in Drury Lane, and thankful for the faith they have shown in the series, and, of course to all the readers who write to say how much they enjoy reading about Charles Dickens in his role as an amateur detective working with Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street.
“The theme of this new book is magic, and it is interesting to note how many references there are to Dickens as a magician. William Thackeray’s daughter, Annie, called him the ‘brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless’, while another friend called him ‘bewitching’. The writer C. J. Montague referred to him as ‘the great magician’ who ‘wove his fireside spells.’
“Dickens creates a world of extraordinary and eccentric beings. There are magicians and madmen, murderers, demons, impossible doubles, strangers in mirrors, imps, ghosts and goblins, ventriloquists, fortune-tellers and cardsharps, wooden legs and heads without bodies. It is a world in which objects take on a life of their own. Scrooge’s door knocker becomes Marley’s face, clocks are ‘dumb’ witnesses to crimes, an iron stove is fashioned like ‘Siamese twins’ and gas lamps whisper secrets in the dark or gasp like ‘fiery fish’ in a sea of fog. It’s a strange world of magical transformations, as if Dickens is the conjuror and his quill a magic wand.
“And in real life he practised mesmerism and saved the life of his friend, the artist John Leech, whom he mesmerised into a ‘magnetic sleep’ after Leech had nearly drowned and suffered a blow to the head. He was also an expert magician who wore a black robe and called himself Rhia Rhama Roos — ‘the best amateur conjuror I have seen,’ said the writer Jane Carlyle. He could conjure a boiling Christmas pudding from a top hat, turn a box of bran into a live guinea pig, set fire to pocket handkerchiefs and reassemble them, and turn watches into tea caddies. He bought his magic tricks from Noah’s Ark, a toyshop in Holborn, though he claimed as Rhia Rhama Roos to have studied for ‘ten years in the Plains of Tartary’ to learn his craft.
“Dickens’s references to magicians and magic inspired my new book in which a magician vanishes from the stage, down the trap in a puff of smoke and is not seen again. But Dickens sees the hem of a magic robe in a gas-lit alley where a man bundles a woman into a waiting cab. A bloodied magician’s robe is found in an abandoned trunk at Euston station, and it is for Dickens and Jones to find the connections between these strange events. If it’s murder, where is the body?”
Death in Drury Lane is available to pre-order from Amazon now.
Visit J. C. Briggs’ website for all her latest news.
