Grave Expectations (A Dickens of a Crime)
Charles Dickens is the detective in this historical mystery set in London in 1835. He is soon to marry Kate Hogarth, daughter of his newspaper editor, Charles Hogarth. She is with Charles as they discover the body of his elderly neighbour Miss Haverstock. Dressed in a faded old wedding gown, she has been horribly murdered and dead for some days. Somehow her murder is linked to a convict escaped from Coldbath Fields jail, to a friendly local blacksmith and to an old story about a child drowning as she played with others in the River Thames.
As the mystery winds its way through early 19th-century London we meet members of Charles Dickens’ family, principally his younger brother Fred, along with Kate Hogarth’s parents and her younger sister. We are introduced to the mudlarks—children who searched the mud of the Thames for any item of value, a piece of coal, for instance—and families who are turned out of their homes the moment they are unable to pay the rent.
Redmond accurately presents both Charles Dickens’ personal life and the social conditions of the time that he was so instrumental in laying bare in his novels. The two aspects are woven together as the many facets of this mystery progress towards a conclusion.
The Charles Dickens we meet in this novel is young, inexperienced and just beginning to find some financial success. We see the cruel, callous conditions of the time through his rather naive eyes and sense the depth of his caring for those who are its victims. The plot in part reflects this, but it does not hinder the telling of a fast-moving and engaging story.
