Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  The turning point of the film occurs when a friend visits Darwin and tells him, “Charles, people like De Quincey believe we’re influenced by thoughts and emotions we don’t know we have.”

  Thoughts and emotions we don’t know we have? Sure sounds like Freud, but Freud’s theories about the subconscious weren’t published until the 1890s, forty years after Darwin’s crisis. In fact, De Quincey’s theories about what he called the separate chambers of our minds (he invented the term “sub-conscious”) were initially developed in the 1820s, seventy years before Freud.

  Something in me came to attention. De Quincey? I remembered a long-ago course in nineteenth-century English literature in which a professor mentioned Thomas De Quincey not as a precursor of Freud but as a notorious drug abuser, the first to have written about that forbidden subject, in his scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The professor referred to De Quincey dismissively as a footnote in literature and went on to praise the usual greatest hits of the Romantic and Victorian eras.

  Curiosity compelled me to go to the bookshelf on which, like a pack rat, I still kept my undergraduate textbooks. Given what the professor of my youth had said, I wasn’t surprised that De Quincey was scantily represented: ten pages in a thousand-page anthology. What did surprise me was that while only a portion of one of his essays, “The Mail-Coach,” was included, those few pages were the opposite of what my professor had led me to expect. They were spellbinding.

  With rare vividness, De Quincey described riding next to a mail-coach driver as their vehicle hurtled along a dark road. They both fell asleep. Waking, De Quincey saw a shadow approaching him. The shadow became a carriage speeding around a curve, a man driving, a woman listening to something he was telling her. De Quincey tried to waken the mail coach’s driver, without success. The carriage sped closer. De Quincey struggled to take the reins from the driver, again without success. The carriage raced nearer. The massive size of the coach left no doubt that a collision would destroy the carriage and its occupants. At the last moment, De Quincey roused the driver, who gasped at the danger and turned the coach enough that it only grazed the carriage and yet caused sufficient damage that the woman, aware of how close she came to dying, opened her mouth in a silent scream.

  That resembles a scene from a thriller, but in actuality it’s part of an essay about the English mail-coach system, which (I found out later when I acquired a full text) expands into a discussion about the subconscious and the nature of dreams.

  I was hooked. I bought a copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Reading that 1821 memoir, I felt that the little gentleman was speaking directly to me as he recalled the death of his father and the abuse he suffered because of his indifferent mother and his four guardians. His escape from school, his winter on the cruel streets of London, his relationship with his beloved Ann, their tragic parting, his first experience with laudanum… De Quincey’s description of these events gripped me.

  I learned that he created a further sensation with his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” the third installment of which was the most blood-soaked true-crime narrative written until that time, describing at length the notorious Ratcliffe Highway multiple murders that terrorized London and all of England years earlier, in 1811. It’s as if he was actually there, I thought. And that’s when the idea for Murder as a Fine Art came to me. The third installment of that essay was published in 1854. De Quincey was living in Edinburgh at the time. But what if someone lured him to London, promising news about Ann? What if that person used the third installment of the “Murder” essay as an instruction manual, replicating the original Ratcliffe Highway killings? What if De Quincey became the suspect? What if…?

  Seldom have plot elements fallen so swiftly into place for me. But as every novelist knows, the plot’s the easy part. What matters is how the story is handled, and in this case, the task was huge. Some historical fiction is often little more than costume drama, with modern dialogue and attitudes.

  What I had in mind was something more immersive. Before I wrote the first sentence, I wanted to become an expert in De Quincey, as if I were writing a doctoral dissertation about him. To support his wife and eight children as well as his laudanum habit, he wrote an impressive number of essays, memoirs, book reviews, translations, and stories. His collected works amount to thousands of pages. Like a Method actor absorbing a role, I read those pages again and again, each time finding new insights. I decided that wherever possible, I would adapt De Quincey’s prose into the text and especially his dialogue, channeling him. As his American publisher noted, De Quincey “talked with an eloquence I had not heard surpassed. It seemed as it if were sinful not to take down his wonderful sentences.”

  Then I needed to learn about De Quincey’s life and all the events that he hadn’t written about in his memoirs. In that regard I was immeasurably helped by Robert Morrison’s biography The English Opium-Eater. Professor Morrison and I eventually struck up an e-mail friendship, during which I learned even more. Murder as a Fine Art is dedicated to him, as it is to another De Quincey biographer, Grevel Lindop, whose The Opium-Eater also proved to be extremely informative.

  Next, I needed to learn about 1854 London, to the point that I convinced myself I was actually there. What were the streets made of? What sort of money did people carry? How heavy were their clothes? What were the ingredients of an ordinary meal? How did people bathe?

  For two years I traveled into the past, reading nothing that wasn’t related to that time and place. Among numerous books, the following were especially revealing: Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas, Heather Creaton’s edition of Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women, Orlando Figes’s The Crimean War, Judith Flanders’s Inside the Victorian Home, Alison Gernsheim’s Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Gillian Gill’s We Two: Victoria and Albert, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England, Liza Picard’s Victorian London, Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, Judith Summers’s Soho: A History of London’s Most Colourful Neighborhood, Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, F.M.L. Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830 –1900, and J. J. Tobias’s Crime and Police in England 1700 –1900. Gregory Dart’s essay “Chamber of Horrors” in Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (edited by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts) was also helpful.

  Some books deserve special mention. The best account of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak is Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic, which describes Dr. John Snow’s desperate search for the source of the disease. Snow had considerable help from clergyman Henry Whitehead. Unfortunately my narrative had no room for Reverend Whitehead, so I am pleased at last to mention him.

  The most complete account of the Ratcliffe Highway killings is The Maul and the Pear Tree, by noted mystery author P. D. James and T. A. Critchley. One element that this fascinating book doesn’t discuss is the curious similarity of names between John Williams, the accused killer, and John Williamson, one of the victims. The first time I read that John Williams killed John Williamson, I thought it was a typographical error. The 1811 court transcripts don’t draw attention to the similarity. Only G. K. Chesterton (a century after the slayings) thought the almost identical names worthy of comment: “A man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson. It sounds like a sort of infanticide.” Because De Quincey pioneered theories about the subconscious, I decided that not only infanticide but also patricide and a host of other psychoanalytic topics would figure prominently in my re-creation of the original murders.

  I studied London maps of the period. The layout of Coldbath Fields Prison is based on a contemporary diagram, as is the layout of the British
East India docks and Vauxhall Gardens. I learned a new vocabulary, employing words that have long since fallen out of use: dustman, mudlark, dipper, dollymop, linen lifter, rookery, costermonger, and many others.

  The only fiction I read belonged to the mid-Victorian period, especially works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, who provided minute details about what characters ate and wore and so on. Collins’s fame came a few years after De Quincey with The Woman in White in 1860 and The Moonstone in 1868, but he has strong relevance to De Quincey, for while Collins is often credited with being the inventor of the sensation novel, De Quincey’s persistent topics of drug abuse and murder anticipated the sensation mania, qualifying him as a major influence on the genre. Collins acknowledges as much in The Moonstone when his characters explicitly discuss De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which provides a clue to the solution of the mystery.

  De Quincey also influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who in turn influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes, so to a degree De Quincey also contributed to the invention of both the mystery genre and its most famous detective.

  Murder as a Fine Art is my version of a nineteenth-century novel. Although modern novels almost never use the third-person omniscient viewpoint, nineteenth-century novels favored it, allowing an objective narrator to step forward and provide information. I found that device to be helpful in explaining aspects of Victorian life that modern readers would otherwise have found as baffling as a culture in an alien universe. I ignored another modern convention by mixing viewpoints and inserting sections from a first-person journal, a frequent device in sensation novels. By returning to the nineteenth century, I felt liberated to use more ways to tell a story.

  Despite my lengthy research, I sometimes differed from the record. For example, Emily would not have referred to De Quincey as “Father” but would instead have called him “Papa,” with the emphasis on the second syllable. In an early draft, I used the historically accurate “Papa,” but it made Emily sound juvenile, and I abandoned the device in favor of “Father.” Similarly, on occasion I condensed some of De Quincey’s quotations and combined a few events in his life.

  For plot reasons, I was forced to include a deliberate historical error. I’m aware that by 1854 Dr. Snow had moved from Soho’s 54 Frith Street and resided at 18 Sackville Street in the nearby district of Mayfair. But the proximity of Frith Street to where teenage De Quincey had lived in the empty house on Greek Street (only a block away) was too convenient to be ignored. I finally decided that Snow’s Sackville address was undergoing renovations, requiring him to return to his previous Frith Street address.

  Otherwise, Murder as a Fine Art is as historically accurate as I could make it. For two years, I had the pleasure of living in 1854 London. I hope that you, too, enjoyed the adventure.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AS ALWAYS, I’m grateful for the friendship and guidance of Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich along with the other good folks at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, especially Lauren E. Abramo and Rachel Stout.

  I’m also indebted to the splendid team at Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, particularly (in alphabetical order) Judith Clain, Theresa Giacopasi, Deborah Jacobs, Josh Kendall, Wes Miller, Miriam Parker, Michael Pietsch, John Schoenfelder, Ruth Tross (in the UK), and Tracy Williams. Copyeditors and proofreaders are my last line of defense; in this case I’m grateful to William Drennan and Peggy Leith Anderson, respectively.

  One of the pleasures of doing research is that I have the opportunity to become friends (sometimes only through e-mail) with people who are generous enough to teach me about my subject. One of those I already mentioned: biographer Robert Morrison (The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey). A world-class scholar of Romantic and Victorian literature, Robert is a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He graciously read the manuscript of Murder as a Fine Art and advised me about the fine points of De Quincey’s life. He also sent me copies of hard-to-find De Quincey documents as well as scholarly articles that I hadn’t been able to locate.

  Jeff Cowton at the Wordsworth Trust (Dove Cottage, Grasmere, the UK) was helpful in providing a photograph of Thomas De Quincey and his daughter Emily that’s available on my website, davidmorrell.net, along with terrific additional artwork by Tomislav Tikulin.

  My good friend Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, provided immeasurable encouragement when I told her that I was traveling to 1854 London, a departure that neither of us could ever have expected.

  My wife, Donna, gave her usual excellent advice as my first reader. I appreciate her decades of patience as each day for several hours I become a hermit.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAVID MORRELL WAS BORN in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. As a teenager he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. Stirling Silliphant’s scripts for that series were an unusual blend of action and ideas, so impressing Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

  The work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his MA and PhD in American literature. There he also met the esteemed science fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a groundbreaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

  That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972, while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international best sellers, including the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries that premiered after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.

  Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but also his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as The Naked Edge, Creepers, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.

  Morrell is an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

  To send him an e-mail, please go to the contact page at his website, davidmorrell.net.

  Also by David Morrell

  Novels

  First Blood

  Testament

  Last Reveille

  The Totem

  Blood Oath

  The Brotherhood of the Rose

  The Fraternity of the Stone

  Rambo (First Blood Part II)

  The League of Night and Fog

  Rambo III

  The Fifth Profession

  The Covenant of the Flame

  Assumed Identity

  Desperate Measures

  The Totem (Complete and Unaltered)

  Extreme Denial

  Double Image

>   Burnt Sienna

  Long Lost

  The Protector

  Creepers

  Scavenger

  The Spy Who Came for Christmas

  The Shimmer

  The Naked Edge

  Short Fiction

  The Hundred-Year Christmas

  Black Evening

  Nightscape

  Illustrated Fiction

  Captain America: The Chosen

  Nonfiction

  John Barth: An Introduction

  Fireflies: A Father’s Tale of Love and Loss

  The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing

  Edited By

  American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young

  edited by David Morrell and Sandra Spanier

  Tesseracts Thirteen: Chilling Tales of the Great White North

  edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell

  Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads

  edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner

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  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  1: The Artist of Death