Anne Perry’s Victorian crime novel The Face of a Stranger was published in 1990. This is the first William Monk book – there were 24 altogether. However, Perry had already had published nine books featuring her team of Thomas and Charlotte Pitt (there are 32 in this series). At the time of her death in 2023, aged 84, she’d had 102 books published.
At the end of July, 1856, William Monk regains consciousness in hospital. He’d forgotten his name and all of his past up to the accident three weeks earlier. He soon learns that he is Peeler, a Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector. An envelope in his belongings tells him his home address – 27 Grafton Street – where for the first time he looks in a mirror. ‘It was not that it displeased him especially, but it was the face of a stranger, and not one easy to know’ (p20).
Briefly, he visits his sister (knowledge gleaned from his desk) in Northumberland where he recuperates. When he returns to work, his boss Runcorn gives him a difficult six-week-old murder case to solve. Major the Honourable Joscelin Grey, a Crimean war hero and a popular man about town has been killed in his rooms. He’s teamed up with a novice, John Evan.
Monk’s problems are mounting. He can barely remember how to behave as a detective, though happily he has his wits about him and conceals his memory loss, not wanting to lose his job. From what he can discover, he had not been particularly liked by his fellow policemen. Piecing together his past was going to be no easy task: ‘...learn to know himself, and he would grow firmer memories in reality. His sanity would come back; he would have a past to root himself in, other emotions, and people’ (p67).
Runcorn suspects a member of the House of Lords but has no proof. Monk has to tread carefully – again at risk of losing his job. During his investigation, Monk meets a number of gentry as well as a nurse recently returned from the Crimea, Hester Latterly. ‘Hester was abrasive, contemptuous of hypocrisy and impatient of dithering or incompetence and disinclined to suffer foolishness with any grace at all. She was also fonder of reading and study than was attractive in a woman, and not free of the intellectual arrogance of one to whom thought comes easily’ (p174). Hester is indeed a worthy foil for Monk.
The Crimean War figures in the story through traumatic memories, and includes snippets about Alan Russell, the brave war correspondent and Rebecca Box, a heroic nurse. The terrible slums of the London rookeries are depicted well. It is not all grim; there is humour and some enjoyable verbal fencing.
Perry’s grasp of the Victorian period brings the story to life. There is one moment that brought to mind Michael Dibden’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978); however, as the tale went on I was happily disabused of that thought entirely. If I had one criticism it would be Perry resorting to dialect for a few minor characters.
An
excellent historical mystery novel.