Inspector Swain
4 total works
When John Posthumous Lerici, decadent poet, black magician and unacknowledged son of Lord Byron, is murdered, the family hire Inspector Swain. His investigations lead Swain through the familiar hunting grounds of Victorian Brighton and Pimlico. But as the truth of Lerici's criminal associations come to light, it reveals the corruption of Scotland Yard officers by two of the century's most skilful international swindlers and blackmailers, Harry Benson and Billy Kurr.
In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows - but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living. Now, one after another, the girls who work the Waterloo Road wake in the morning to feel the slow agony of the most vicious of poisons ...victims of the man called Fred. The police have only a string of 'catch me if you can' letters to taunt them, whilea whole mailing list of Victorian worthies find demands for money with menaces in their mail. Inspector Swain investigates ...'Original story told in a highly individual manner' Times Literary Supplement
Robert Louis Stevenson's strange and sinister tale of the gentle Dr Jekyll and the sadistic Mr Hyde is filled with oddities suggesting a dark reality behind a classic fiction. That dark reality is laid bare in the casebook of Inspector Swain. The 'parliamentary murder' of 1884 leads the inspector and his portly sergeant, Lumley, from plush drawing-room to madhouse cell in search of the link between a coward in the red-coated ranks at Isandhlwana, a killer in Cheyne Walk and the satanic persona of Edward Hyde.
The man the world knew as Lewis Carroll, author of the adventures of Alice, was known to his colleagues in the Christ Church Common Room as the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a middle-aged Oxford don. His hobby was photography, especially of pubescent girls 'in their favourite dress of nothing to wear'. When evidence of the Reverend's pastime falls into the hands of Charles Augustus Howell, the infamous Victorian blackmailer, and a murder victim is fished out of the Isis, Inspector Swain is called to investigate the case that casts the shadow of doom over Dodgson. 'One of the most entertaining mysteries of the year' Julian Symons 'Catches the authentic whiff of steaming sexuality behind the Victorian whiskers' Guardian