THE PICKWICK MURDERS

Charles Dickens is thrown into prison for murder. And not just any murder.

Charles, parliamentary reporter for the liberal daily Morning Chronicle, is no fan of Sir Augustus Smirke, the well-named candidate for Parliament who’s rumored to have seduced several younger women—including perhaps a maid who’s gone missing. But he can’t imagine the revenge Smirke, or someone else, will take for his less-than-flattering coverage. Receiving a letter that seems to offer him membership in the prestigious Lightning Club, Charles hastens to the club headquarters, where an initiation that requires him to escape from the 1835 version of a panic room brings him into uncomfortably close contact with Samuel Pickwick, the club’s president, whose throat has been slit. Turned over to the constabulary by Tracy Yupman, the vice president who denies ever having seen him before, Charles counts down the days to the publication of Sketches by Boz, his first book, and dreams of how he can turn his plight into a fictional account, as he languishes in Newgate Prison. Redmond’s descriptions of daily life in Newgate, based largely on the real Dickens’ account of his own much briefer visit, are appropriately grimy, reeking, and desperate, with occasional shafts of sunlight. Since Dickens is locked up, the job of identifying the conspirators who framed him for murder falls to his fiancee, Kate Hogarth, who follows a trail of anonymous letters that interweave threats against her and Charles with poetic allusions that lead her closer and closer to the answer she seeks. But the prison sequences remain the highlight here.

Excellent period flavor, a so-so puzzle, an improbable series of clues, and the usual foreshadowings of the hero’s career.