June, 2013
The Yard by Alex Grecian is a vivid tale of fiction firmly anchored in fact. Reading The Yard with its detailed descriptions of vermin-infested slums, manure-slicked streets, and riversides roiling with sewage and not infrequently with dead bodies, you wonder how anyone would dare venture out into the London streets at night!
Jack the Ripper known as Saucy Jack was only one boogie man titillating the public imagination and taunting the efforts of the ham strung police newly located in Scotland Yard. Indeed, while the public was terrified of murderers like Jack, they seemed to have nothing but contempt for their overworked, underpaid police force.
Sir Edward Bradford the commissioner of police tries a new crime fighting tactic. He appoints a dozen police officers to a new unit called The Murder Squad. The task of the squad is to focus on murder investigations, of which there is no dearth, while leaving other officers to investigate less heinous crimes.
The first assignment for newly appointed Detective Inspector Walter Day, fresh from his former police work in pastoral Devon is the gruesome discovery of a fellow detective whose mutilated body has been stuffed into a trunk and left at a train station. Could this be the work of Saucy Jack or of some copycat murderer? If even trained police detectives can be trapped and murdered, how can any member of the public be safe?
Meanwhile Constable Neville Hammersmith makes his own gruesome discovery of a five year old chimney “climber”, i.e. chimney swift’s helper, whose small body has been stuffed up the chimney of an elegant doctor’s home. The doctor denies all knowledge of the crime, but his wife seems to be hiding a secret. As if that were not enough, several men with fine, bushy beards are also turning up murdered; and a young boy has been kidnapped from his front yard, one of many such children who disappear from their homes ,never to be found. Are these crimes related, or are they all random acts of violence in a tormented and dangerous city?
Detective Inspector Day is in over his head, so he turns to Dr. Bernard Kingsley, a coroner at University College Hospital for help. Kingsley believes in the untested science of criminology and uses the study of fingerprinting and other delicate forensic clues to try to help the Murder Squad. Yet few detectives in Scotland Yard acknowledge Kingsley’s work , and even Detective Inspector Day is skeptical at first.
The Yard is an engrossing tale that deftly weaves all these disparate acts of violence and detection into a blood-stained pattern that makes a kind of gruesome sense. If appears that a new detective series featuring Day, Kingsley, and Hammersmith has been launched with this book; if so, readers can look forward to more Victorian crime stories that race along with gripping tension, psychological insight, and authentic period detail.
