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American novelist Alex Grecian's THE YARD, a tale of Victorian Scotland Yard, was named "one of the best books of 2009" by the US National Public Radio (NPR). The series continued with THE BLACK COUNTRY, and THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP. The latest instalment, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, continues the saga with suspense, wit, and hints of modern topicality that are never overdone. Moreover, it adds a new fictional resolution to the mystery of the never-identified 1880s murderer Jack the Ripper, and therefore is a must-read for followers of the Ripper mythos.
Here, post-murder-spree Jack is very much a creature of the Yard's making. After his legendary crime spree, he doesn't disappear from London completely. Instead, his fate becomes intertwined with that of his institutional nemesis, the Yard, and in particular with sometime detective Walter Day. After Day's disappearance, his business partner, Nevil Hammersmith, tries to find him. To do so, Hammersmith must operate a Sam Spade-type detective agency, but he is neither Spade nor Holmes. As Grecian explains, Hammersmith's agency specializes in looking for missing people, but don't ask its record on finding them.
A very large cast of characters, especially at the detective agency, may initially bore or confuse newcomers to Grecian's series, but the suspense soon takes off as Hammersmith pursues Day and comes closer and closer to Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, Day's wife Claire - a pseudonymous children's writer and the daughter of an unsettling eccentric - also tries to determine if he is alive and how to find him - which is only the easiest of the struggles she experiences as the plot thickens.
Grecian builds his late-Victorian world in persuasive, compelling detail. This is a place where discarded cigar ends become the stock of a small business, the department store is a new and vaguely frightening concept, and the boundaries between law enforcement, psychiatry, and criminality are rather porous. But it's also a world a great deal like ours - especially, perhaps, like the twenty-first century United States - where security panics inspire sadism as much as they persecute it and the police aren't always the most transparent or trustworthy lot.
Is LOST AND GONE FOREVER one of the best novels of the year? I'm not convinced it is. Some characters need fleshing out, and the inclusion of several extracts from Claire's fictional children's novel, whose villain is named 'Jack', seem belaboured. They explain, albeit in metaphor and parable, the emotional journey that Grecian reveals in Claire's actual life. However, these interludes also vitally demonstrate that even closed cases are never really 'resolved': that they leave problems and strangenesses for their survivors and the surrounding culture to work through, for years or perhaps lifetimes. Watching the characters attempt this work provides the novel with a great deal of its suspense, though the action-packed, twist-riddled plot also contributes. As a whole, LOST AND GONE FOREVER proposes the troubling idea that injustice and trauma are rarely, well, lost and gone forever.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature. https://uwgb.academia.edu/RebeccaNesvet
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, July 2016
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