(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
Ladies and gentlemen and ill-advised members of the ocean liner-going public – this novel is not your grandmother’s Agatha Christie.
The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz, which first moves at a liner-appropriate pace before hitting the narrative pedal-to-the-metal and gloriously defying all expectations, may sound from its back cover blurb like Marple or Poirot may pop out from behind a non-descript plant at any moment and go “ah-ha!” with detective-like epiphanic intensity, but do not be fooled.
While The Empress Murders is set in 1925 at the height of the glittering roaring twenties and the cast of characters would be well at home in an English aristocratic library or two, the discovery of a body of someone far below decks simply feels like a burdensome pain-in-the-neck for darkly unhappy onboard detective Inspector Archie Daniels, the body count soon climbs.
What starts as the loss of a deckhand quickly escalates and while the rich toffs, and some hangers-on, treat it like some sort of strange theatre far removed from their indolent, gin-soaked and dinner-studded days, it soon becomes abundantly and bloodily clear that there’s someone on board who aims to engineer as high a death toll as they can reasonably manage.
And, oh, they can manage a lot of death and mayhem, driven, as we eventually discover way before Daniels does, some rather twisted ideas and tendencies which, of course, all of the most prodigious killers have well disguised.
It’s the end of 1925, for those keeping log, and I’m churning the Atlantic run en route to New York. I’ve a full manifest of passengers and crew, not a cancellation or stowaway; one corpse. My hull was scraped over the summer, and the racy new cabaret saloon is proving popular. I feel an Empress this evening, as the slate ocean gobbles up the pale peach of sun.
Welcome aboard. I fear we’re in for a rough crossing.
The thing about The Empress Murders is that it is not your standard murder mystery.
This is, as you’ll discover on its happily demented pages, is a very good thing indeed for while you can predict, with a happy cosiness, where a Christie or any number of accomplished modern crime writers might go, you’ll be hard-pressed to predict the course of a novel which owes as much to magical realism in parts as it does to sleuthing and detective work of old.
As we meet a raft of compelling, if slightly one-note characters – though if you stick around, and oh, you will, you’ll discover much substance of an unsettling kind fills these people of initial trope and cliche – from the Beaumonts to corpulent Reverend Daglish to newly married couple, Tony and Nicole, who look beatifically happy at first until you find out what, ahem, floats their drug-addled marital boat, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a case of rich passengers being knocked off on by one by an someone who knows them well and knows they deserve to pay.
But there’s no active morality play at work, at least not in the way you expect, with The Empress Murders far more concerned with the greater sins of the British Empire which manifests itself in a gaggle of self-involved passengers who are oblivious of the hierarchical polity to which they belong and who dismiss the initial murders because they do not happen above a certain deck.
(courtesy official Toby Schmitz Instagram)
Interestingly too, the narrator of The Empress Murders is not actually one of the people onboard.
Quite who or what it is must be left to the reading but suffice to say, the long-glancing perspective of this narrator, who knows well the flawed and broken thoughts and acts of men and women, especially those of a higher station who think little of those below, provides an interesting look at what is happening onboard a ship which may be sailing to New York City across the Atlantic but which is also gliding into the twilight of a British Empire groaning from the fatalistic weight of its many excesses.
This, then, is a murder mystery with a historical and moral drive of a different kind, one that looks wider and higher than simply those of its characters and more to a society as a whole which has filled the ship with exactly the kinds of problems and shuddering societal chasms that will soon bring down the empire itself.
In many ways, The Empress Murders is an excoriating blast at a sclerotic and rotten-to-the-core world which manifests itself in an increasingly bloody body count and a series of terrifying events which illustrates with fierce horror that whatever surety you might find in the established order can be ripped asunder, personally and on a far wider and more destructive scale.
There’s a lot of accusing going on here but it’s wrapped up in a trippy, bloodthirsty narrative that begins reasonably sedately before ending manically like a blood-soaked murdered laughing like a fiend, silhouetted against an accusing moon.
Palmer opens the door, can’t look in. ‘Man overboard, sir. It’s [REDACTED]’
The ship, Daniels notes, has not slowed.
If anything …
That isn’t actually a scene in the book but it’s not far off as The Empress Murders gets its Scream franchise on, and diabolically despatches so many people by the end that it happens at an almost dizzying pace and to a frenetic degree.
This is a novel that is both highly literate, with an insightful and highly critical eye on the sins of an era dominated by empire and the innate “superiority” of a system dedicated to wealth, privilege and hierarchy, and also playfully sudsy, having to have some fun with its characters, even as it skewers them, literally and metaphorically.
One thing that The Empress Murders has in spades is a narrative vivacity which sometimes feels a little energetic and peppy, leaving you to go and re-read sections which move at a brisk clip and with a fervent eye on saying a whole lots of very clever, highly observant things very quickly.
But while it may be a little pell-mell and frenetic for its own good at times, and some very clever observations are lost in a breathless rush of quite extraordinarily good, if overcrowded, writing, The Empress Murders is, by and large, an enormously satisfying read, fun and playful at turns before looming into chilling, horrific darkness, the two sides of the human condition on buoyant display in a novel which has humanity on the stand to atone for its sins as much as it seeks to find the killer so the same can be done to them.