Peter Ackroyd: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Before I discovered fan fiction I used to read a lot and went through a lot of crime fiction of the sort where you were reading because you cared about the detective not the plot. I liked Kinsey Milhone because she never knew more than me, and we were both surprised together at the identity of the person shooting at her in the dark in the penultimate chapter. I read Hugh Laurie's 'The Gunseller' a few weeks ago and while I did like the first person narrator I couldn't follow the plot and it really pissed me off that he knew more than me; so I'll never be reading that again.
I was quite confused by 'Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem', what with the different narrators and the backwards and forwards in time and whatnot, but I can't really justifiably consign it to the same Oxfam bookshop bag as 'The Gunseller' because there were plenty of clues but I just made too much of them. I knew, because it was obvious even to me, that Elizabeth was the only murderer, but halfway through (after putting the book aside for a week of TV and the internet) I decided that her husband didn't really exist and that she was playing both parts; I base this on all the emphasis on her cross dressing and because there didn't seem to be anyone other than Aveline who saw both of them together. Aveline, I thought, was in on it and because she was lesbian who enjoyed being pegged by the male Elizabeth. I willfully ignored that in the beginning both Dan and Uncle see them both together AND there must have been a corpse. Silly me. I think I like my version better though. But I did enjoy it and would like to read it again.
But I still don't understand why Dan Leno got top billing; he was barely in it. And cramming Karl Marx into it as well - for why? The George Gissing bits bored me; I really loathe that man, having been forced to read 'New Grub Street' as an undergraduate.
I was quite confused by 'Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem', what with the different narrators and the backwards and forwards in time and whatnot, but I can't really justifiably consign it to the same Oxfam bookshop bag as 'The Gunseller' because there were plenty of clues but I just made too much of them. I knew, because it was obvious even to me, that Elizabeth was the only murderer, but halfway through (after putting the book aside for a week of TV and the internet) I decided that her husband didn't really exist and that she was playing both parts; I base this on all the emphasis on her cross dressing and because there didn't seem to be anyone other than Aveline who saw both of them together. Aveline, I thought, was in on it and because she was lesbian who enjoyed being pegged by the male Elizabeth. I willfully ignored that in the beginning both Dan and Uncle see them both together AND there must have been a corpse. Silly me. I think I like my version better though. But I did enjoy it and would like to read it again.
But I still don't understand why Dan Leno got top billing; he was barely in it. And cramming Karl Marx into it as well - for why? The George Gissing bits bored me; I really loathe that man, having been forced to read 'New Grub Street' as an undergraduate.