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TomAllAlone Lynn Shepherd 9781780331669 Books

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TomAllAlone Lynn Shepherd 9781780331669 Books

This book is the creepiest, most cinematographic and gripping Victorian mystery I've ever read. Sordid and squalid and thank god I was thinking the worst of everyone all along because I was right (I so wished I wasn't, but no).
Justice triumphs, but at what cost?

This is even more charged than murder at Mansfield park, and the author brings to life deranged people and serial killers in the shadows to life in a way that has me jumping at small noises.

Wow.


Tags : Tom-All-Alone's [Lynn Shepherd] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book Description Tom-All-Alone's is a dark and gripping Victorian murder mystery, immersing the reader in a grim London underworld. Product Description London,Lynn Shepherd,Tom-All-Alone's,Corsair,1780331665

TomAllAlone Lynn Shepherd 9781780331669 Books Reviews

Lynn Shepherd's Tom-All-Alone's (published under the title The Solitary House in the United States) tells the story of Charles Maddox, a detective working in London in the year 1850. Charles has been hired by a man to search for his illegitimate granddaughter, born some years before. Additionally, Charles is hired by attorney Edward Tulkinghorn to discover who is responsible for sending threatening letters to one of Tulkinghorn's upper class clients. As Charles faces a family crisis, he attempts to uncover the answer to these two mysteries, but any progress he makes seems only to lead to more questions and to a cover-up more sinister than Charles could have imagined.

In Tom-All-Alone's Lynn Shepherd recreates the darker side of Victorian London. While it may be easy for contemporary readers to romanticize Victorian culture--probably thanks to the abundance of overly sentimentalized adaptations of Dickens's novels ala Masterpiece Theatre--Shepherd reminds us of the very social issues with which Dickens himself was concerned disparities in income and social class, the exploitation of children, the marginalized position of women, the social constructions of "madness," and a particular attitude surrounding illicit sex.

Drawing on threads borrowed from Dickens's classic Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Shepherd writes a detective story set in the dirty, seedy neighborhoods of Victorian London. In her "Acknowledgments", Shepherd explains that she seeks to "create a `space between' these two great novels, where [she] could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse." Additionally, in her "Acknowledgments", Shepherd reminds us that in Bleak House Dickens manages to "create a whole new literary genre the detective mystery," and it is just such a work that Shepherd herself creates. In addition to her use of Bleak House and The Woman in White, Shepherd is also clearly indebted to Collins's The Moonstone, which is really the first full-blown "detective mystery". What Shepherd really accomplishes, then, is not just a "detective mystery" but a reexamination of our own constructions of Victorian England and the vices endemic to the culture and time period.

Shepherd's writing style feels as though she is consciously trying to be literary in nature, mimicking to some extent the style of Dickens and Collins. This leads to word choice and even sentence structures that may feel a bit foreign and archaic to contemporary American readers. Shepherd's narrator is particularly compelling in that here we have a narrator that is part of both the world the reader lives in and the world of the novel. This is evident when the narrator consciously works to bridge the gap between these two cultures, so different in some significant ways. Interspersed with the main narrative are sections titled "Hester's Narrative", devoted to an entirely different narrator and point of view. While I can see that, again, these sections mirror the writing of Dickens and Collins in some interesting ways, the "Hester" sections are a bit of a distraction and feel forced. In fact, Hester herself feels like a poor reflection of the character of Esther in Bleak House. In the end, the "Hester" sections do not add much to the novel. Thematically, they work to give us a kind of perspective on madness and the effects of sexual abuse in Victorian England (or maybe any culture); they really don't do much to advance the story.

Additionally, the references to Dickens's and Collins' work feel a bit heavy handed at times. For example, Lady Deadlock, a central character in Bleak House, is mentioned several times in passing, yet these references do not add to the novel, do not forward its plot, do not add anything in the way of thematic texture. Rather, they work merely as reminders that Shepherd's novel is itself a kind of retelling of the society that Dickens presents. And yet, one is left with the feeling that Shepherd is trying a bit too hard to be clever and to work in threads borrowed from her literary predecessors. Shepherd's novel would be even more successful if she allowed it to stand on its own.

As a reader, I enjoy a good mystery as well as a nicely constructed period piece. Shepherd manages to give me both of these. Overall, her novel is both engaging and well written. It seems that one trend in contemporary publishing is mysteries that are somewhat comic in tone, presenting smart, snarky detective figures, like Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum. Shepherd avoids this tone, offering a work that is more serious and literary in nature. While this tone, combined with the critique of Victorian society, makes the work compelling for me, some readers will find it off putting, I suspect.

Shepherd has made me want to revisit Dickens's Bleak House and Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone. I think that Shepherd would consider that high praise; I certainly mean it as such. I am also eager to read Shepherd's Murder at Mansfield Park as well as any other fiction she may publish in the future.

NOTE This review was originally published in a slightly different form at the wonderful, useful site Luxury Reading. I encourage you to visit Luxury Reading for a wide variety of reviews by a number of talented reviewers. This review was also posted at my web site, Speaking of Books.
I'm sorry to say that I found this book a major disappointment after the wonderful Murder at Mansfield Park. There is no doubt that Lynn Shepherd writes well and has the ability to conjure up the atmosphere of Victorian London. However I felt that in this book she tried too hard to pack in references to some of the greatest novels of that age and in so doing disrupted the flow of her own plot.

The main reference is of course to Bleak House, but to set oneself up for a comparison to Dickens and then not to include any of the fun and joyousness that lightens the tone of even Dickens' darkest novels seems a strange decision and one that didn't work for me. Again, as she did in Murder at Mansfield Park, Shepherd twists the characters and plot of Bleak House but this time in a way that really grated. In MAMP, she gave us the enjoyable character of Mary to replace those characters she had made unlikeable - in this novel, I found all the characters unlikeable. And the irritating omniscient narrator device, constantly dragging us forward to the present day to look back on Victorian London with an air of smug superiority, became a really annoying distraction as the book wore on.

The first half of the book meandered along without giving us a real idea of what the detective Charles Maddox was trying to investigate - was it the disappearance of his sister, the deaths of the babies in the churchyard, the Tulkinghorn connection? The second half was more focused and she did manage to pull some of the threads together at the end, but still left too much unresolved, presumably as a hook for a follow-up - a follow-up that I'm afraid I will not be avidly awaiting.

I hope that Ms Shepherd will soon allow her own voice to develop and stop relying on attracting the fans of the great fiction of the past. The quality of her writing and plotting (in MAMP at least) shows she has the talent and if she were to create her own world, I suspect it would be a good deal more satisfying than these skewed versions of our much-loved fictional worlds.
She is a better writer than this. I really don't like sick stories about children. It is too bad when this kind of thing is on the market.
an exrortinnary sense to time and place. the author appears to have a grasp of perid that is close to living in the period.
The book did not come quite up to my expectations. Apart from some nice Victorian elements, the style of the author, repeatedly button-holing the reader, mars the novel in the end. I would definitely not advise a Dickens fan, such as I am, to purchase the book, unless one likes oddities in whatever form connected with the Inimitable.
This book is the creepiest, most cinematographic and gripping Victorian mystery I've ever read. Sordid and squalid and thank god I was thinking the worst of everyone all along because I was right (I so wished I wasn't, but no).
Justice triumphs, but at what cost?

This is even more charged than murder at Mansfield park, and the author brings to life deranged people and serial killers in the shadows to life in a way that has me jumping at small noises.

Wow.