Tom Wasp and the Seven Deadly Sins
Early one morning, Tom Wasp, master chimney sweep, finds the garrotted corpse of the unlikeable Arnold Harcourt, bookseller and philanderer, in the yard of Dolly’s chop house.
What first appears to be a crime of passion proves to be a literary mystery, with at its centre the manuscript of a lost play by the Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton, which may or may not have been annotated (or more) by an even greater contemporary. To complicate matters, Tarlton’s work is mixed up, in more ways than one, with Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno.
This is the third book in Myers’s series featuring her sooty sleuth. Soot pervades the novel, both literally and metaphorically: Wasp describes his investigation in terms of flues, chimneys and coal dust: his solution is likened to the sweep’s brush emerging at last above a chimney pot. Although the novel is set in Victorian London and is written for adults, Myers’s portrait of the teeming, squalid underside of the city has echoes of Leon Garfield’s Smith set a century earlier (a considerable compliment) and whilst there are some comparisons to be made with Dickens (not least the choice of names: Phineas Snook, Algernon Splendour and Cockalorum the cat I found particularly attractive) her characters are believable and avoid Dickensian caricature.
There are occasional errors of continuity that closer copy-editing could have picked up (like ‘no smile…’ followed in the next paragraph by ‘the smile disappeared’) but nevertheless this is an immensely appealing, engagingly written and original read. I appreciated Myers’s historical note at the end, which explains clearly how she has woven together carefully researched fact and fiction in a story that holds the tension right to the end.
