Murder as a Fine Art (Thomas and Emily De Quincey Book 1)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Murder as a Fine Art By David Morrell Little, Brown and Company Copyright © 2013 David MorrellAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-316-21679-1 CHAPTER 1 The Artist of Death Something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads tokill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, grouping, lightand shade, poetry, and sentiment are indispensable to the ideal murder. LikeAeschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michelangelo in painting, a great murderercarries his art to a colossal sublimity. Thomas De Quincey "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" London, 1854 Titian, Rubens, and van Dyke, it is said, always practiced their art in fulldress. Prior to immortalizing their visions on canvas, they bathed, symbolicallycleansing their minds of any distractions. They put on their finest clothes,their best wigs, and in one case even a diamond-hilted sword. The artist of death had similarly prepared himself. Dressed in evening clothes,he sat for two hours staring at a wall, focusing his sensations. When darknesscast shadows through a curtained window, he lit an oil lamp and put theequivalent of brushes, paint, and canvas into a black leather bag. Mindful ofRubens, he included a wig, which was yellow in contrast with the light brown ofhis own hair. A matching actor's beard was added to the bag. Ten years earlier,a beard would have drawn attention, but a recent trend made beards almost to beexpected, as opposed to his increasingly unusual clean-shaven features. He set aheavy ship carpenter's mallet among the other items in the bag. The mallet wasaged and had the initials J. P. stamped into its head. In place of the diamond-hilted sword that one artist had worn as he painted, the artist placed a folded,ivory-handled razor in his pocket. He stepped from his refuge and walked several blocks until he reached a busyintersection, where he waited at a cab stand. After two minutes, an empty hansomfinally came along, its driver seated prominently behind the sleek vehicle. Theartist of death didn't mind standing in plain view, despite the cold Decembernight. In fact, at this point he wanted to be seen, although anyone observinghim would soon find it difficult as fog drifted in from the Thames, casting ahalo around gas lamps. The artist paid eightpence for the driver to take him to the Adelphi theater inthe Strand. Amid the bustle of carriages and the clop of hooves, he made his waytoward a well-dressed crowd waiting to go inside. The Adelphi's gas-lit marqueeindicated that the sensational melodrama The Corsican Brothers was beingperformed. The artist of death was familiar with the play and could answer anyquestions about it, especially its unusual device of two first acts, whichoccurred in sequence but were meant to be imagined as taking placesimultaneously. In the first part, a brother saw the ghost of his twin. The nextpart dramatized how the twin was killed at the same time the brother saw hisghost. The revenge in the final part was so violent, with such copious amountsof stage blood, that many members of the audience claimed to be shocked, theiroutrage promoting ticket sales. The artist of death joined the excited crowd as they entered the theater. Hispocket watch showed him that the time was seven twenty. The curtain wasscheduled to rise in ten minutes. In the confusion of the lobby, he passed avendor selling sheet music of the "Ghost Melody" featured in the play. He exitedthrough a side door, walked along a fog-shrouded alley, concealed himself behindshadowy boxes, and waited to determine if anyone followed him. Feeling safe after ten minutes, he left the far end of the alley, walked twoblocks, and hired another cab, no longer needing to wait inasmuch as numerousempty cabs were now departing from the theater. This time, he went to a lessfashionable part of the city. He closed his eyes and listened to the cab'swheels shift from the large, smooth, granite pavers on the main streets to thesmall, rough cobblestones of the older lanes in London's East End. When hedescended into an area where evening clothes were hardly common, the driver nodoubt believed that the artist intended to solicit a streetwalker. Behind the closed door of a public privy, he took ordinary clothes from theleather bag, put them on, and folded his theater garments into the bag. As hecontinued along increasingly shabby streets, he found stoops, nooks, and alleysin which he dirtied the common clothes he now wore and smeared his leather bagwith mud. He entered a filthy mews clean-shaven, with light brown hair, and leftit wearing the yellow beard and wig. His collapsible top hat had long since beenput in the bag, replaced by a weathered sailor's cap. The ship carpenter'smallet was now in a pocket of a tattered sailor's coat. In this way, the artist occupied two hours. Far from being tedious, theattention to detail was pleasurable, as was the opportunity to reflect upon thegreat composition ahead. Through the concealing fog, he came within sight of hisdestination, a mediocre shop that sold clothing to merchant sailors whofrequented this area near the London docks. He paused on a corner and glanced at his pocket watch, taking care that no onesaw it. A watch was so unusual in this impoverished area that anyone whoglimpsed it would suspect that the artist wasn't the sailor he pretended to be.The hands on the watch showed almost ten. Everything was on schedule. Hisprevious visits had revealed that the area's policeman passed along this streetat ten fifteen. Punctuality was part of the job, each patrolman navigating histwo-mile route every hour. The time it took for the constable to reach thispoint seldom varied. The only person in view was a prostitute, whom the chill night had notencouraged to go back to whatever cranny she called home. When she started toapproach, the artist gave her a sharp look that made her stop abruptly anddisappear in the fog in the opposite direction. He returned his attention to the shop, noting that its window had a film of dustthat dimmed the glow of a lamp inside. A man's shadow stepped out and swung ashutter into place, closing as usual at ten. The moment the shadow went back inside, the artist crossed the empty street andreached for the door. If it was already bolted shut, he would knock, with theexpectation that the merchant wouldn't begrudge the further five minutesnecessary for a final sale. But the door wasn't locked. It creaked as the artist pushed it open and steppedinto a shop that was only slightly warmer than the street. A man turned from lowering an overhead lantern. He was perhapsthirty—thin, pale, and weary-eyed. He wore a black shirt with a bandcollar. One of the shirt's buttons didn't match the others. The cuffs of histrousers were frayed. Does a great work of art require a great subject? Does the murder of a queencreate a grander impact than that of a common person? No. The goal of the art ofmurder is pity and terror. No one pities a murdered queen or prime minister orman of wealth. The immediate emotion is one of disbelief that even the powerfulare not immune to mortal blows. But shock does not linger whereas the sorrow ofpity does. On the contrary, the subject should be young, hardworking, of low means, withhope and ambition, with sights on far goals despite the discouragement thatwearies him. The subject should have a loving wife and devoted childrendependent on his never-ending exertions. Pity. Tears. Those were therequirements for fine art. "Just about to lock up? Lucky I caught you," the artist said as he closed thedoor. "The missus is getting dinner ready, but there's always time for one more. Howcan I help?" The lean shopkeeper gave no indication that the artist's bearddidn't appear genuine or that he recognized the man, who in another disguise hadvisited the shop a week earlier. "I need four pairs of socks." The artist glanced behind the counter and pointed."Thick. Like the kind you have on that shelf up there." "Four pairs?" The shopkeeper's tone suggested that today they would be a sizablepurchase. "A shilling each." "Too much. I hoped to get a better price buying so many. Perhaps I should gosomewhere else." Behind a closed door, a child cried in a back room. "Sounds like somebody's hungry," the artist remarked. "Laura. When isn't she hungry?" The shopkeeper sighed. "I'll add anextra pair. Five for four shillings." "Done." When the shopkeeper walked toward the counter, the artist reached back andsecured the bolt on the door. He coughed loudly to conceal the noise, aided bythe hollow rumble of the shopkeeper's footsteps. Following, he removed themallet from his coat pocket. The shopkeeper stepped behind the counter and reached for the socks on an uppershelf, where the artist had noticed them a week earlier. "These?" "Yes, the unbleached ones." The artist swung the mallet. His arm was muscular.The mallet had a broad striking surface. It rushed through the air and struckthe shopkeeper's skull. The force of the blow made a dull cracking sound,comparable to when a pane of ice is broken. As the shopkeeper groaned and sank, the artist struck again, this time aimingdownward toward the slumping body, the mallet hitting the top of his head. Nowthe sound was liquid. The artist removed a smock from his bag and put it over his clothes. Afterstepping behind the counter, he drew the razor from his pocket, opened it,pulled back the shopkeeper's now misshapen head, and sliced his throat. Thefinely sharpened edge slid easily. Blood sprayed across garments on shelves. The overhead lantern seemed to brighten. A fine art. Again, the child cried behind the door. The artist released the body, which made almost no sound as it settled onto thefloor. He closed the razor, returned it to his pocket, then picked up the malletnext to the bag and reached for the second door, behind which he heard a woman'svoice. "Jonathan, supper's ready!" When the artist pushed the door inward, he encountered a short, thin woman onthe verge of opening it. She had weary eyes similar to the shopkeeper's. Thoseeyes enlarged, surprised by both the artist's presence and the smock he wore."Who the devil are you? " The hallway was narrow, with a low ceiling. The artist had seen it briefly whenpretending to be a customer a week earlier. In the cramped area, to get a fullswing, he needed to hold the mallet beside his leg and thrust upward, strikingthe woman under her chin. The force knocked her head backward. As she groaned,he shoved her to the floor. He dropped to one knee and now had space to raisehis arm, delivering a second, third, and fourth blow to her face. To the right was a doorway into a kitchen. Amid the smell of boiled mutton, adish crashed. The artist straightened, charged through the doorway, and found aservant girl—someone he had seen leave the shop on an errand a weekearlier. She opened her mouth to scream. In the larger space of the kitchen, hewas able to use a sideways blow that stopped the scream, shattering her jaw. "Mama?" a child whimpered. Pivoting toward the doorway, the artist saw a girl of approximately seven in thecorridor. Her hair was in pigtails. She held a ragdoll and gaped at her mother'sbody on the floor. "You must be Laura," the artist said. He whacked her skull in. Behind him, the servant moaned. He slit her throat. He slit the mother's throat. He slit the child's throat. The coppery smell of blood mingled with that of boiled mutton as the artistsurveyed his tableau. The rush of his heart made him breathless. He closed his eyes. And jerked them open when he again heard a child's cry. It came from farther down the corridor. Investigating, he reached a second opendoor. This one led into a crowded, musty-smelling bedroom, where a candlerevealed a baby's cradle, its wicker hood pulled up. The cries came from beneaththe hood. The artist returned to the kitchen, retrieved the mallet, proceeded to thebedroom, smashed the cradle into pieces, pounded at a bundle in the wreckage,and slit its throat. He rewrapped the bundle and put it under a remnant of the cradle's hood. The candle appeared to become stunningly bright. In absolute clarity, the artistnoted that his hands were covered with blood. His smock was red with it, as werehis boots. Finding a cracked mirror on a drab bureau in the bedroom, hedetermined that his beard, wig, and cap were unmarked, however. He went to the kitchen, filled a basin from a pitcher of water, and washed hishands. He took off his boots and washed them also. He removed the smock, foldedit, and set it on a chair. After leaving the mallet on the kitchen table, he stepped into the hallway,admired the servant's corpse on the kitchen floor, and closed the door. He shutthe door to the bedroom also. He walked to the front of the store and consideredthe artistry of the mother and the seven-year-old girl in the blood-coveredhallway. He closed that door also. The shopkeeper's body could be seen only if someonelooked behind the counter. The next person to enter the shop would encounter aseries of surprises. Terror and pity. A fine art. Abruptly someone knocked on the door, making the artist whirl. The knock was repeated. Someone lifted the latch, but the artist had madecertain that the bolt was secured. The front door did not have a window. With the shutter closed on the mainwindow, whoever knocked on the door could not see inside, although the lamplightwas evidently still detectable through cracks around the door. "Jonathan, it's Richard!" a man shouted. "I brought the blanket for Laura!" Moreknocking. "Jonathan!" "Hey, what's the trouble there?" an authoritative voice asked. "Constable, I'm glad to see you." "Tell me what you're doing." "This is my brother's shop. He asked me to bring an extra blanket for his babygirl. She has a cold." "But why are you pounding?" "He won't open the door. He expects me, but he doesn't open the door." "Knock louder." The door shook. "How many people live here?" the policeman's voice asked. "My brother, his wife, a servant girl, and two daughters." "Surely one of them would hear you knocking. Is there a back entrance?" "Down that alley. Over the wall." "Wait here while I look." After grabbing his bag, the artist opened the door to the hallway, steppedthrough, and remembered to close the door. The risk made his heart pound. Hehurried past the bodies of the mother and child, almost lost his balance on theslippery floor, and unlocked a back door. Stepping into a small outside area, heagain took the precious time to close the door. The fog smelled of chimney ashes. In the gloom, he glimpsed the shadow of whathe assumed was a privy and ducked behind it, just before a grunting man pulledhimself over a wall and scanned his lantern. "Hello?" The man's voice was gruff. He approached the back door and knocked."I'm a policeman! Constable Becker! Is everything all right in there?" The constable opened the door and stepped inside. As the artist heard a gasp, heturned toward a murky wall behind the privy. "God in heaven," the constable murmured, evidently seeing the bodies of themother and the girl in the hallway. The floor creaked as the constable steppedtoward them. The artist took advantage of the distraction, set his bag on top of the wall,squirmed up, grabbed his bag, and dropped over. He landed on a muddy slope andslid to the bottom, nearly falling in slop. The noise when he hit seemed so loudthat he worried the constable must have heard him. The legs of his pants weresoaked. Turning to the right, he groped along the wall in the foggy darkness.Rats skittered. Behind him, he heard a distinctive alarm. Every patrolman carried a woodenclacker, which had a handle and a weighted blade that made a rapid snappingsound when it was spun. The constable now used his, its noise so loud that itcouldn't fail to be heard by other patrolmen on their nearby routes. The artist reached a fog-bound alley, guided by a dim streetlamp at the far end. "Help! Murder!" the policeman shouted. "Murder? Where?" a voice yelled. "My brother's shop!" another voice answered. "Here! For heaven's sake, help!" Windows slid up. Doors banged open. Footsteps rushed through the darkness. Nearing the light at the end of the alley, the artist could see enough to hidethe razor behind a pile of garbage. A crowd rushed past in the fog, attracted bythe din of the patrolman's clacker. (Continues...) Excerpted from Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell . Copyright © 2013 David Morrell. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist *Starred Review* At the start of this exceptional historical mystery, an artist of death prepares himself for his greatest creation—the gruesome slaughter of a young shop owner and his family. In 1854, East Londoners hadn’t seen such horrific murders since 1851, when John Williams also killed a shopkeeper and his family in a nearby neighborhood. The new crime finds Detective Inspector Shawn Ryan at the grisly, chaotic crime scene, where evidence is trampled as the killer blithely escapes. Visiting London at the time, for reasons he can’t fully understand, is Thomas De Quincey, scandalous “opium eater” and author of the 1827 satirical essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and two newer essays in which he lauds various horrific details of the Williams killings as sublime art. DI Ryan initially treats the drug-riddled, elderly writer as a suspect but eventually accepts his help, if grudgingly. Military-thriller writer Morrell switches genres here in a riveting novel packed with edifying historical minutiae seamlessly inserted into a story narrated in part by De Quincey’s daughter and partly in revealing, dialogue-rich prose. The page-flipping action, taut atmosphere, and multifaceted characters will remind readers of D. E. Meredith’s Hatton and Roumonde mysteries and Kenneth Cameron’s The Frightened Man (2009). Sure to be a hit with the gaslight crowd. --Jen Baker --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Illustrations for Murder as a Fine Art Illustrated by Tomislav Tikulin Illustrated by Tomislav Tikulin A Review by Katherine Neville NY Times and #1 international bestseller Katherine Neville has been referred to as "the female" Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, and Stephen Spielberg. Her adventure-packed Quest novels have been called a "feminist answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark ," (Washington Post) and were credited with having "paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code " (Publishers Weekly). At first glance, Murder as a Fine Art --a jewel-like, meticulously-crafted historic detective story, set in the high-Raj period of Victorian England--might seem a complete departure for the king of the Thriller genre and "father of Rambo." It takes a tremendous commitment, not to mention a bit of a risk, for a writer like David Morrell, at the pinnacle of a long and successful career, to decide to create a work in a very different genre. Morrell's secret weapon, which for decades has placed him at the very forefront of suspense writers, has always been his use of impeccable hands-on research: he has honed the art of seamlessly interweaving rich troves of fascinating detail into his plot lines and character sketches, so that we readers never feel--as so often happens with background research found in fiction--that we are being subjected to a tutorial. Part of the reason Morrell's research has always paid off so well in his previous works has been his relentless quest to learn and master many of the skills he was writing about: flying the airplanes, loading the weapons, earning the black belts. He has rehearsed his characters' skills much as an actor rehearses a character role. But in Murder as a Fine Art , how would he accomplish this, when the story is set in the 1850s, and his main protagonists are a young woman who is self-liberated from Victorian constraints, including her corset!--and her father, a notorious opium addict! He accomplishes it, and brilliantly, by steeping himself so thoroughly in the context of nineteenth century London that, in his own words, he became "a Method actor," guiding us through the London fog (I never knew it was filled with charcoal!)--while acting out in his mind the roles of these real historic figures. The "Opium Eater" himself, our lead character, was author Thomas de Quincey, a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge who wrote thousands of pages that today largely have been forgotten. But his most infamous book of the day, and one that has long outlived him, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , was so scandalous that it topped the charts of that era and was preached against (perhaps with good cause) in the churches. De Quincy helped spawn the school of "sensationalist" literature, with his memoirs and essays influencing fiction writers from Wilkie Collins to Edgar Allan Poe to Arthur Conan Doyle. Morrell has chosen to open his novel in 1854 because that date marks the publication of the final installment of de Quincey's equally shocking three-part essay: "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," a lurid and gory description with pre-Freudian overtones, of East End murders that took place more than forty years before our story begins. The novel opens with de Quincey arriving in London for his essay's publication, accompanied by his daughter Emily, to learn that he himself is suddenly the prime suspect in a murder that precisely replicates those decades-old killings he'd so lavishly described in his book. This wonderful set-up provides the real historic character, Thomas de Quincey, with the fictional opportunity to match his laudanum-enhanced wits against the villain's, while simultaneously utilizing his vast learning about the first crimes, and his personal understanding of the subconscious and sublimation, in aiding the police to solve the actual crimes. It doesn't hurt that Morrell's own vast learning enlightens us along the way, with asides on little known Victoriana, covering everything from the gutters, sewers and cesspools of the seamy side of London, to the highest echelons (equally seamy) of British political and bureaucratic corruption. In fleshing out this era for us, Morrell has deployed one of the favorite Victorian novelistic vehicles: an omniscient narrator who can fill us in on "back story" contexts and details--everything from the vast panorama of the the Opium Wars between Britain and China, to fascinating minutiae like the 37-pound costumes that women wore daily, made of yards of fabric over whalebone hoops and corsetry. There is something about using this particular literary technique, in a book like this, that rings truer than a straight narrative because it is a storytelling style so accepted that it appears in nearly every novel of the period. Perhaps for Morrell's use of this particular method of reportage, Murder as a Fine Art has been compared with recent books that are set in the past, like The Dante Club and The Alienist ; I would add that it also brings to mind another tour de force: the stunning literary footwork of an author who lured us into another alien era with equal mastery and success: John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman . But my personal favorite in Murder as a Fine Art is the character of Emily de Quincey. Who could not cherish a girl who can shed her whalebone cinches and don a pair of bloomers so she can dash down streets and leap gutters alongside the London constabulary? A girl with the wits to mess up her hair, rip open her bodice, and stagger into an angry mob that's threatening her police escort, and to divert the rabble to her imaginary "attacker" at the opposite end of the alley? Emily repeatedly saves the day by paying attention to the people around her, their needs and desires; by grasping how the context of their lives alters the roles they are able to play in it; by using her wits and her common sense as a complement to her father's brilliant, if drug-induced, vision. The vicious psychotic killer may have been thwarted this time around, but I suspect that Emily de Quincey's services will still be needed to keep London streets safe from other threats creeping out of the dank London fog, in future: I vote for a sequel, Mr Morrell! --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. David Morrell is best known for his debut 1972 novel First Blood, which would later become the successful Rambo film franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. He has written 28 novels, and his work has been translated into 26 languages. He is also a former professor of American Literature at the University of Iowa and received his PhD from Penn State. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. "An absolute master of the thriller."--Dean Koontz"The finest thriller writer living today, bar none."--Steve Berry"THE master of the thriller, period."-- Crimespree"Everything [Morrell] writes has a you-are-there quality, and that, combined with his ability to propel characters through a scene, makes reading him like attending a private screening."-- Washington Post Book World"The absolute master...the craftsman so many of us look to for guidance."--Andrew Vachss"Morrell stands head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries."-- National Review --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more