Raymond Chandler once said that ‘the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels.’ This holds true for genre writing generally. Historical fictions, like murder mysteries, can often be dismissed as the thoughtless product of the hack, not the artist. For every ‘good specimen’ (and one might nominate Gore Vidal and Hilary Mantel as practitioners of this art), there are shelves groaning with the mediocre, the outright bad, and even the so-bad-it-is-good (Dennis Wheatley).
Andrew Taylor, an expert in the realm of murder and mystery fiction (he reviews crime novels for this magazine), must know the potential pitfalls. The Scent of Death is a triumph of genre plotting: a detective story, and a piece of period writing that excites and surprises in equal measure.
The success of historical detective fiction rests largely on the choice of period and detective. Taylor has been wise in both respects. His story begins in New York on 2 August 1778, during the ‘strange and unnecessary’ American War of Independence. Fresh off the boat from England to a city effectively under siege by ‘rebels’ is Edward Savill, a civil servant from the American Department, whose brief — to ‘report on the administration of justice in the city in all its aspects’ — places him in a convenient position to investigate any suspicious murders that might occur during his stay.
He is presented with a case immediately: the murder of a man connected to his host’s family (the ancient Judge Wintour, his come-hither daughter-in-law Arabella, and her flighty husband Jack), who may hold the secret to a mystery embodied in a ‘box of curiosities’ that everyone seems keen to get their hands on.
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