Some Rise By Sin
London, 1829: while passing themselves off as bakers, Sammy and Facey make a living as talented “Resurrection Men” and as debt-collectors, in which a “silk” (a young corpse) nets them significantly more from the anatomists than a “crepe” (an old one).
Then they get wind of an exceptional prize: the cadaver of a hermaphrodite. They are not the only ones interested in the corpse, however, and as poor Bobby Herman’s remains are stolen and stolen again, the tension escalates, for there are those who will not stop even at murder, knowing that there is one law for the rich and another for the disenfranchised.
Scott-Wilson immerses the reader in the teeming, stinking underworld of a city before Bazalgette’s modern sewers. It is not only his research that is impeccable but the consistent, immersive “voice” of his prose. It would be easy to label as Dickensian characters like Rosamund (not “fair”, but pockmarked), the brothers Kak John and Pure John, the albino Teeth (veteran of Marshal Blücher’s Prussian army), the performers in a freak show and the considerate former prize fighter Tom Canon, but this risks reducing them to caricatures, which they are anything but.
They might make their living in sordid and sometimes dangerous ways, but each character shines on the page as a vivid, often dignified human being capable of joy and pain. I would like to say that Some Rise by Sin is filmic, though it would be hard for any film-maker to as authentically recreate what Scott-Wilson achieves on the page.
