The Yard (2012)

It’s difficult for me to imagine a time when police work didn’t involve fingerprinting and the forensics we have today, but we all know that time existed. The Yard takes us back to that time, with Jack the Ripper fresh in the memory of the public, and a lot of people calling into question the ability of the police.

This novel opens with the discovery of a body in a trunk at a train station. The body belongs to Inspector Little, and no one knows why he is dead, just that it likely has something to do with his work. Without the use of modern technology, even determining what weapon might have been used to kill someone is difficult, let alone tracing down the person who did the killing...

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First Line: London, 1889. Nobody noticed when Inspector Christian Little of Scotland Yard disappeared and nobody was looking for him when he was found.

Just months after Scotland Yard spectacularly failed to catch Jack the Ripper, Colonel Sir Edward Bradford has created the Murder Squad-- twelve men put in sole charge of solving all the violent crimes committed in the largest city in the world. Morale has never been lower at the Yard, for their failure to catch the Ripper has turned the population of London against them-- and now someone is killing them, sewing the police officers' eyes and mouths shut and stuffing their bodies in steamer trunks. Detective Inspector Walter Day, the newest member of the Murder Squad, will need all the help he can get from Dr. Bernard Kingsley (the Yard's first forensic pathologist) and Detective Constable Nevil Hammersmith if these murders of their colleagues are to stop.

Even before I finished this book, I wanted to have copies of it magically appear in the hands of all historical mystery fans. When I did finish it, I had to restrain myself from dancing around the house in delight. What a marvelous book!

Alex Grecian's descriptive powers would have Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins clapping him on the back in approval. In The Yard, Victorian London comes to life in all its smelly, crowded and depraved glory. Some readers may glance at the book's almost 600-page bulk and walk away, but this story reads like a house afire. The murders of the policemen aren't the only crimes Day, Kingsley and Hammersmith wind up investigating either. When the story begins, Day has only been at the Yard a week. As he becomes more accustomed to the men with whom he's working and with workplace routine, he and the other two men begin to pick out similarities in other crimes... and sometimes things just fall into his lap.

Grecian does not leave his villains under cloaks of invisibility until it's time for the ending reveal. No, one by one they raise their masks, pull back their hoods, and show themselves to us. What's brilliant about this is that there's absolutely no reason to despair. This book is about so much more than identifying a few criminals. Knowing their identities and watching them follow the good guys around during their investigations really ratchets up the suspense-- especially when the chase leads Day and Hammersmith through narrow streets in the dead of night or in the creepiest asylum you'll ever have the "pleasure" of exploring.

But more than lush descriptions and an intricate plot, The Yard is about people. We learn the backgrounds of Day, Kingsley and Hammersmith. We come to know them, to like them, and to care about their safety. We see the way they interact with people from every level of society. We learn what they believe to be important. I know that one of the basic tenets of crime fiction is justice-- to right wrongs, to speak for the dead. The Yard does all this and much more, but it's been a long, long time since I've read a book that was filled with so much compassion and humanity. Not only do Day, Kingsley and Hammersmith see the absolute worst that we humans can do-- they still believe we're worth fighting for, and worth saving. This book spoke to me on so many levels. I can't recommend it highly enough. ( )

I enjoyed The Yard by Alex Grecian, an engaging debut mystery set in Victorian London. Scotland Yard is dealing with a distrusting public after its failure to capture Jack the Ripper, and now one of its own has been killed and crammed into a steamer trunk. Grecian successfully creates a grimy, atmospheric, and often odor-ific (see excerpt below) London. He also gives us some great characters to follow as this series unfolds. Inspector Walter Day, new to the city from Devon, is the pup who's asked to solve the case, having been mysteriously anointed by another revered and now-retired inspector. He's an open-faced, compassionate fellow who doesn't lack for wit or bravery, and has married well above himself to the devoted but previously pampered Claire. He's assisted by the clever Dr. Kingsley, who's keen on forensics in a world where most have no idea what he's talking about. Fingerprinting? Looking for a pattern among crimes? Analyzing threads and puncture wounds? For some, he might as well be from Mars. Part of the enjoyment is seeing many now-accepted practices at their outset.

There's also Constable Hammersmith, who is indefatigable and inspired by childhood memories of the mine-working he has now avoided. The Yard is run by Colonel Sir Edward Bradford, who is hampered by the loss of an arm, but is a stand-up guy concerned about his men, and nobody's fool.

Here's the non-spoilery excerpt, involving "Hobgate", the worst of the "workhouses" for the mentally ill ("just a step away from the asylum") and for vagrants "unable or unwilling to work and possibly violent":

"The ground floor of the workhouse was one huge room, partitioned off into smaller chambers. The walls on both sides of the makeshift hallway had been hastily thrown up and were rough, so close that splinters snagged at the sleeves of their overcoats. Day inhaled thought his mouth to avoid the odors of human waste and body odor. Every six feet there was a hole cut in each wall. A doorway without a door, so small that a grown man would have to crawl through it.

Day and Kingsley divided the hall, each of them taking a side, and stooped to peer into each room that they passed. The lantern light cast long moving shadows, but there was little else to see inside the chambers. They were all identical, two long platforms fastened to the walls and covered with straw, a walkway between them that ended at a second door-hole. Each platform was deep enough to sleep three men, and the snores echoing throughout the hall were evidence that Hobgate had few vacancies. At the far end of each room was a chamber pot. A single sniff was enough to confirm that the pots were rarely emptied."

Day and Kingsley hope to rescue someone from this rat warren, and the killer may be loose in it, too. There are other threads - child kidnapping and exploitation, revenge killings involving men with beards, witnesses who have their own background stories connected to the crimes - and those threads may be tied together too neatly for some in the end. But the detailed projection of life in London at that time, the many well-drawn characters, and the engaging story that keeps the pages turning, make this one a winner. ( )

Perfect review from Alison Flood
Slick">http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/24/the-yard-alex-grecian-review

Slick and sick is how fictional serial killers generally come these days, but not in debut novelist Alex Grecian's historical thriller The Yard, where the murderer stumbles from killing to killing, chases the child he has abducted down London's streets in a black hansom cab and attempts to snaffle damning evidence off an inspector's desk. Throw in two deranged prostitutes and a dead child abandoned up a chimney, poisonings and throat slittings galore, amidst lashings of London fog, and you get a story that is bonkers, exuberant – and hard to put down.

The scene is London, 1889, a year after Jack the Ripper's last victim died, and the city is struggling to come to terms with his crimes.

When the body of a Scotland Yard detective is found in a trunk, his lips and eyes sewn shut, and a series of bearded men are found brutally murdered, their faces neatly shaved, it looks like at least one more serial killer is on the loose. The new man on the Yard's murder squad, Walter Day, just up from Devon, is put on the grisly case, with the help of forensic science pioneer Dr Bernard Kingsley. But can they find the killer before more people die?

Grecian switches between the perspectives of his bald killer, nervously watching the police on his tail and offing anyone who stumbles upon his secret, and those of various policemen on the trail of a tangled array of criminals. He handles their disbelief, their horror, that another serial killer could be plaguing London in the wake of the Ripper, very well. "The Ripper was out there somewhere in the grey city. Or perhaps the Ripper was dead and gone, having destroyed the confidence of The Yard and of the citizens who no longer trusted The Yard to protect them," he writes. "Whether he was gone or not, it hardly mattered. Saucy Jack had gifted them all the idea of himself. Others like him circled like lions around the herd. The city was changed ... He opened a door to certain deranged possibilities and there will be more like him."

The American author, who previously created the graphic novel series Proof, "remarkably never visited London before or during the writing of The Yard", boasts his publisher. He has done well, then, to summon up such an atmospheric, disturbing vision of the city at the end of the 19th century, from the match girl killed by phosphorus poisoning to the horrors of the workhouse. And he's a dab hand at fearsomely gruesome murders and autopsies. It's a shame his research didn't extend to his dialogue, however, which is peppered with anachronisms ("no worries"; "He's gonna hurt me"). And did he really have to call his Welsh coalminers' village Collier, and one of his London detectives Hammersmith?

There are also terrible puns, his policemen have a nasty habit of falling asleep in tight spots, and a few too many subplots. But don't let that put you off. Grecian is making no pretensions to a highbrow literary version of Victorian London, so don't expect one. Instead this debut – the first in a series – is a pell-mell race to a frankly preposterous finale: gory, lurid and tons of guilty fun.

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Absolutely briiliantt. Looking forward to the sequel. ( )