by Hereward Proops
222 pages, Kindle Edition
Review by Paul Fenton
Imagine if Fox Mulder were transported
in time back to Victorian Era London to work as a police detective. You
there? (As an aside: if you're too young to know who Fox Mulder is, you
sicken me.) Now, beef him up a bit, make him taller and more brawny.
Naturally with all that extra muscle he's going to have a bit more
testosterone running around his body, making him gruffer, less patient and more
violent. Now, pick up a big cricket bat, the heavy kind favoured by West
Indian batsmen, and swing it as hard as you can straight into the middle of his
face.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you
Detective Edmund Forrester.
Forrester is a magnet for
strangeness. If you've read Proops's
novel starring the same character – the Sound of Shiant – you'll already know
that Forrester has a reputation for dealing with certain odd cases.
Unconventional crimes where the perpetrator doesn't necessarily need to
be locked up. No, what they usually need is a good killing, if that's at
all possible. Strange Cases contains eleven short tales chronicling some
of his less conventional assignments, and to really appreciate them I'd
recommend also reading the Sound of Shiant; the stories
run chronologically, beginning with early cases in London and progressing
to Forrester's adventures in America, and in the middle of this time-line sits
Shiant. Reading the novel first will
provide some more context for the latter half of the collection, where
Forrester is travelling Caine-like through the United States ... though very
little would be lost by reading them as a standalone collection.
The detective is an uncomplicated man
with a clear sense of right and wrong and with very little tolerance for anyone
who sits on the wrong end of that see-saw. Murder someone? That's a
killing. Trick people out of their savings? That's a killing.
Terrorise a community in the form of a horrific and mythical creature
from some vile dark corner of the Never-never? You better believe that's
a killing. Forrester's ace in the face of all this weirdness is that he
just doesn't give a damn. Maybe he can't always take down the bad guys
with his fists or his guns, but by God he'll give it a solid shake.
The first half of the book establishes
Forrester's pedigree as an investigator who isn't perturbed by a bit of
strange. The opening tale concerns the murder of an Englishman in
Venice by Count Emile de Ferrante; the squirrelly part of the case
being he was in another city at the time of the crime. (The Count
co-stars in another story post-Shiant, in which Ferrante is determined to
take Forrester down in a western-style showdown with a supernatural edge.
The fool!) Forrester takes on case after case in a
fashion reminiscent of the old "monster of the week"
X-Files episodes: cursed emeralds, flesh-eating mists, monster-men, oh my!
Then there's a shift in tone as an older and beaten-down Forrester heads
off to the United States, sacked from Met and uncertain of his place in the
world. Weirdness, however, cannot be escaped by boat, and he soon finds
more strange cases landing at his doorstep. It's a different flavour of
odd than he faced in the UK though, card sharks and snake-oil salesmen and
thieves. These are opportunistic crimes, motivated by personal gain
rather than unknowable supernatural urges or basic evil ... until we reach the
final story, the Snallygaster, in which Forrester is confronted by a threat
which just about eclipses anything he dealt with in Shiant.
Strange Cases is a solid
collection of rollicking adventure stories, and I can't help wondering if
Proops might be using it as a bridge to another Forrester novel, this one set
in the States. If I had to pick a favourite story, it'd be the Terror of
London – the character of Spring-Heeled Jack could easily support, I believe, a
longer story (which is helped by him actually surviving his encounter with
Forrester). This Victorian Mulder knows the truth is out there, but he
knows equally well it would be best off it stayed the bloody hell away from
him. And the Scully in the story? Scully would just be the name of
his gun.
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