The September Society by Charles FinchSt. Martin’s Minotaur, 2008

The September Society is the sequel to A Beautiful Blue Death, which I wrote about here; like the first book, it’s set in Victorian England and features a wealthy amateur detective, Charles Lenox. Also like the first one, it’s sometimes a little clunky and over-explanatory—I’m thinking particularly of an aside on the Reform Act of 1832, and also things like this, about the British in India: one character (presumably lower in rank than the other) makes a crack about the other being “curious,” i.e. nosy, and then we get this: “In another place this might have sounded rude, but being white was a great equalizer in that country, and these men were too intimate to maintain entirely the ceremonies of respect and rank that defined the British” (2). But the book has its strengths, too: I quite like Lenox and his circle, and wanted him to succeed, and didn’t want to put the book down once I got into it.

The story is set mostly in 1866 in London and Oxford, with a prologue set in India nineteen years earlier, and the plot centers on a mysterious group of ex-military men who call themselves The September Society. Something happened in India nineteen years before the start of the story, and whatever it was is having an impact on current events. Lenox gets involved when George Payson, a student at Lincoln College, Oxford disappears: his mother goes to meet him for tea as she always does, runs into him a bit early, and arranges to meet him at a restaurant: but he never shows. And when she goes to his rooms again, she finds a dead cat, stabbed with a letter opener that belonged to her dead husband, who, as it turns out, served in India nineteen years before. She asks Lenox to investigate, and Lenox soon finds out that a close friend of Payson’s, Bill Dabney, is also missing. It seems like the two might have fled together, but it’s not immediately clear where or why.

There’s pleasure in watching Lenox unravel (or fail to unravel) the various clues, but there’s still more pleasure in the book’s descriptions of Oxford, where Lenox himself also went to school (and where the author, Charles Finch, also studied). It’s great to see Lenox revisiting familiar pubs and alleys and meadows (and of course, the Bodleian), and we’re treated to descriptive passages like this:

A number of long, shallow punts were covered and locked on the banks of the river, past their season until spring, and the famous willow trees had begun to scatter their leaves across the water. The yellowish light of morning appeared over the dreaming spires that Lenox knew so well—Tom Tower at Christ Church, the shining dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the ridged flutes rising from the towers of All Souls. (29)

Or this, about a pub:

It was a low-ceilinged place that dated to the 1300s. (Still leaving it a few hundred years shy of being the city’s oldest continuous drinking establishment.) Once it had been a strong-cider bar, and then briefly a pub called the Spotted Cow, but even to the oldest gents at the stile it had always been and would always be the Turf, hidden away from all but those who really knew Oxford. The wood on the walls was darkened by smoke and time, though the beams holding the roof up were freshly painted white. There was a bar in the front room—above it was the famous first menu of the Turf, a wooden plank with DUCK OR GROUSE written on it—and another in the back room, just by a staircase leading to the rooms above. (31)

The mystery itself strains credulity, a bit, and I couldn’t decide whether having Lenox run into Gerard Manley Hopkins in the library was ridiculous/awesome or just ridiculous, but still, I had fun with this. I’ve been a bit frazzled lately—December always means a lot of busyness at work for me, tying up loose ends before the Christmas break, and this year it’s been compounded by apartment-hunting and a fair amount of accompanying dread—and this was just the kind of light reading I was in the mood for this weekend.