Merry Dickens, with Gore and Mayhem

JessCat, who lives in San Francisco, is my bookish resource/consultant in all things novelistic in the mystery/detective vein. You think you’ve found a new author in that genre? JessCat can give you the titles of his/her previous eight books plus a synopsis of their plots and whether or not you should actually read them. Her tastes are rather indiscriminate since she reads a lot of crap including some highly suspect best sellers but she’s very careful in what she recommends to me since I don’t really read a lot anymore and what I do read I get all bent out of shape if the book turns into a waste of my, admittedly, not very valuable, time. It is a rare book indeed that I have read before JessCat gets her hands on it and even more rare if I recommend it to her. When I told her I liked Louis Bayard’s “Mr. Timothy” and, knowing her dislike for graphic violence, I warned her of some action-filled gore about three-quarters of the way into the book. Her reaction was thus:

“It seems a lot of recent mystery authors now feel compelled to explore the gross and evil, describing in detail the horrible physical aspects of the crime, the twisted psychology of the perpetrator and the psyche and angst of the detective. Even some of my old favorites have succumbed to the lure of the disgusting. I prefer my corpses bloodless, the detective brilliant, and the solutions literate and elegant and not necessarily realistic. I have always loved the genre, but not when the evil gets too graphic or too lovingly explored. I don't feel the need to experience it in my gut or my dreams to appreciate it.”

I’ll be interested in her reaction to Mr. Timothy, presuming my warning hasn’t, well, warned her off reading it.

Mr. Timothy is a very entertaining take on what happens to a peripheral character in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, that being the lame and limpid Tiny Tim of “God-bless-us-every-one” fame. According to the author, Louis Bayard, the poor tyke never had a chance of developing into anything other than the damaged adult he portrays here even though, against all odds, his basic moral goodness continues to lurk somewhere deep down in his damaged psyche. The book is written in “period” style and, although not exactly Dickensian, it’s still rooted in the rococo language of literature produced in 1860. To be more precise, in late December of that year which, if you think about it, would be an anniversary of the ghosts and mayhem suffered by Ebenezer Scrooge a couple of decades, or so, earlier. But, although “Uncle ‘N’,” as he is referred to here, is indeed a part of the book and its plot, it is our Timothy who is center stage and Tim’s ghosts are of an entirely different nature. (By the way, one needs to remember that Tiny Tim is not related to Scrooge in any way, but is the son of Scrooge’s overworked and abused clerk Bob Cratchit and is, therefore, literally an overnight charity case upon whom fortune is suddenly thrust. How’s that for rococo writing?) Anyway, the plot of Mr. Timothy gets dark and murky and, yes, horrific and gory as Tim falls into solving and, of course, eventually dispatching a spectacular horde of criminal horror-mongers with some pretty icky perversions. It is this plot turn that I warned JessCat about.

Mr. Timothy was published in 2003 and I’m sort-of amazed I didn’t stumble across it before. But I was still both charmed and horrified by it. Mr. Bayard’s subsequent book is named Pale Blue Eye and I understand he delves into the psyche of Edgar Allan Poe in that one. Uh oh, JessCat, uh oh.

Full Disclosure: JessCat is my sister.