Something nasty in the coal cellar

Literary non-fiction demands that a respectable household is not really a respectable household — and the Bastendorffs of 4 Euston Square fully oblige. The family take in lodgers at their elegant townhouse in Bloomsbury and, just as they are sprucing it up to welcome their latest in May 1879, a mystery corpse is uncovered in their coal cellar.

It would not spoil anything to say that the Bastendorffs turn out to be a pretty kooky bunch, headed up by Severin, the paterfamilias who started life in rural Luxembourg. Thanks to Severin’s heritage, we skip past the well-worn Disney Victoriana of gas lamps and sooty urchins and into the more unusual territory of London’s burgeoning Germanic subculture. Our ingenious detective hero, despatched to investigate the crime, is Inspector Charles Hagen, also of German descent, who uses the victim’s gold watch and a missed dental appointment to great effect.

However, the scene-stealer — no mean feat for someone who is dead — is Matilda Hacker, the eponymous lady in the cellar. Sinclair McKay artfully pieces together the life of the rambunctious spirit who used to inhabit the grisly remains. Wealthy and eccentric, with no need of work, sixtysomething Hacker was a keen boulevardière. She took to striding long distances every day in ‘costumes of extraordinary pattern and grotesque style’, her skirt hitched up to show her high-heeled boots and silk stockings, and her dyed auburn hair in ringlets ‘like a girl of 18’.

Hacker gets into umpteen scrapes with the police and pops up around London under the guises of a Miss Sycamore, a Miss Bell and a Miss Uish. We are her companions around the upmarket spare rooms of Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Marylebone as she moves on with her strong box full of jewels, trunk of satin dresses and copy of Napoleon’s Oraculum.