It’s May 1873, and Charles Lenox, now 42, is pretty settled as a member of Parliament, and not really an active detective any longer. When this book starts, he’s in Plymouth, about to set sail on a ship called the Lucy, on a trip with two purposes. Publicly, he’s traveling as an emissary from the Queen, and he’s going to Egypt to visit the Suez Canal and meet with the Ismail the Magnificent. But he has a covert mission, too, to meet up with a French informer to find out how much the French know about British intelligence activities in France (five British spies have recently been killed) and to learn if the French are moving towards starting a war. But the intrigue of Lenox’s trip starts well before he ever reaches Egypt: on his first night on board, the ship’s 2nd lieutenant is murdered. Naturally, Lenox finds himself acting as detective, trying to solve the crime as he tries, too, to learn his way around the ship and around naval life.
The Lucy, 200 feet long, with about 220 seamen and 25 officers on board, is a big enough boat, with room for clues and suspects a-plenty. But it’s also an enclosed space: evidence can be jettisoned from portholes, but all the men aboard are stuck aboard, making this a bit like a country-house mystery, except on water and in uniform. The combination of the boat’s novelty, to Lenox and the reader alike, plus the tenseness of its atmosphere after a murder, is pretty excellent, and makes this a satisfying read. I like, too, all the descriptions of the boat and the water and the sky: the last book by Charles Finch I read felt more plot-driven, while this one is back to feeling more atmospheric. There are passages like this, a description of the wardroom, where officers on board dine: it’s “a low-slung, long chamber at the stern of the ship with a row of very handsome curved windows, where lanterns swung gently from their moorings in the roof, casting a flickering light over the wineglasses and silver” (10). Or this, when Lenox first sees Port Said:
There were ships of every nation, Dutch flags, French ones, a dozen others, crowding the waters of the port. The air was black with steam, the docks frantic with action, and the sheer multitude of small craft on the water was overwhelming. In fact the water seemed more densely populated than the town. Men in skiffs went between all the larger ships, selling fresh fish and Egyptian delicacies. There were pleasure boats with prostitutes crowding their decks, official boats levying taxes and examining goods. (257)
I also quite liked the moments of charm and humor. There’s a brilliant game of Follow the Leader, an overnight storm that has all the sailors in surprisingly good moods, and some funny conversations that happen because Lenox doesn’t know a bowsprit from a bowline, so to speak. Lenox has left his former butler/current secretary, Graham, in London, but I love his assigned steward, a guy called McEwan who’s constantly munching on whatever food he can scrounge (a biscuit here, a chicken leg there) and always happily making Lenox eggs or toast and cup after cup of tea. One of the blurbs on the back cover of this book describes it as “Agatha Christie meets Patrick O’Brian,” which reminds me that I want to read some Patrick O’Brian—but not until after April 1! I’m glad that I put a hold on this at the library early enough for it to be an exception to my commitment to the TBR Double Dare.
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