David Morrell is a writer
never pigeon-holed or constrained by the limitations of genre or theme. He
writes about what interests him, and what plays upon his troubled mind – but
one thing common in all his writing, is that it thrills. This is why he,
together with Gayle Lynds [and other
key thriller writers] set-up the International
Thriller Writers, to help promote the Thriller Novel,
or what was termed at the turn of the century the ‘sensation novel’. Thriller
novels [as a loose genre of sorts] have several sub-genres, depending on their
topic, be they work featuring espionage,
adventure, horror, crime-fiction, romance, literary or historical as a
theme. All of Morrell’s fiction can be firmly placed into the thriller genre.
He has written novels of espionage, action and adventure, horror, historical, and
non-fiction,
though his latest work is a real change in direction as MURDER AS A
FINE ART is a literary historical thriller, and one firmly rooted in the
dark recesses of Victorian Britain. There
is a whiff of Dickens, Conan Doyle, a smattering of Springheel Jack, a
shadow of Poe, and the terse uncertainty of Jekyll
and Hyde in the proceedings that underpin MURDER AS A FINE ART, but then
again, Morrell understands his literature, as a Professor of English [with a
Doctorate]. It is obvious that his latest thriller is a labour of love. Although
an American, but Canadian by birth, David Morrell is a strong Anglophile, as
his father was a British Pilot with the RAF during WW2, and that may further
explain his interest in British literature and our heritage.
To discover what MURDER AS A
FINE ART is all about, view the book trailer
The blueprint for the
killings seems to be De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts.” Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De
Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined
Scotland Yard detectives.
In Murder as a Fine Art, David
Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history.
Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant
murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.
Robert Morrison: I love the idea behind Murder as a Fine Art. John Williams commits a series
of sensational killings in 1811. Thomas De Quincey writes his most powerful
essay about the killings in 1854. Somebody reads De Quincey on Williams and
decides to produce his own version of the killings, far exceeding them in
terror. How did this idea come to you?
David Morrell: Robert, coming from a De Quincey scholar, your
enthusiasm means a lot to me. I studied De Quincey years ago when I was an
undergraduate English student. My professor treated him as a footnote in 1800s
literature, giving him importance only because De Quincey was the first to
write about drug addiction in his notorious Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater. I forgot about him until I happened to watch a movie about
Charles Darwin, Creation, which dramatizes the nervous breakdown Darwin suffered while
writing On the Origin of Species. In the movie, someone says to Darwin, “You know,
Charles, people such as De Quincey believe that we’re controlled by elements in
our mind that we’re not aware of.”
Robert: It sounds like Freud.
David: Yes. But Freud didn’t publish until half a century
later. In fact, because De Quincey invented the word “subconscious,” Freud may
have been influenced by him. Anyway, I took down my old college textbook,
started reading De Quincey, and became spellbound. I read more and more of his
work. Then I got to his blood-soaked essay about the terrifying Ratcliffe Highway
murders, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” The idea came to me
that someone would read the essay and, for complicated reasons, replicate the
murders on a more horrifying scale. De Quincey, the Opium-Eater who was
obsessed about murder, would then be the logical suspect.
Read More from Mulholland
Books Here
The novel was first released
in the US and now available
in the novel’s setting Great
Britain and since release, it has being
gathering intense critical acclaim
A killer copying the brutal 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders terrorizes
1854 London in
this brilliant crime thriller from Morrell (First Blood). The earlier slaughters,
attributed to a John Williams, were the subject of a controversial essay by
Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” A
man who considers himself an “artist of death” duplicates the first set of
Williams’s killings by using a mallet and a knife to dispatch a shopkeeper, his
wife, their two children (including an infant), and a servant. The similarities
send the police after De Quincey, who, aided by his able daughter Emily, must
vindicate himself and catch the killer. Morrell tosses in the political
machinations of Lord Palmerston, then Home Secretary, who has been promoting
revolution in Europe to assure Great
Britain’s political dominance. Everything
works—the horrifying depiction of the murders, the asides explaining the impact
of train travel on English society, nail-biting action sequences—making this
book an epitome of the intelligent page-turner.
I loved the way Morrell went back and forth between
what felt like pure history (about the enormous percentage of people in
19th-century England who were addicted to laudanum, for instance, or how
newfangled the idea of “detectives” was), then to page-turning action
sequences, and then to Emily’s account, told in an old-fashioned and likeable
voice. The murderer gets his turn as well, and we come to understand his warped
reasoning.
This book is fastidiously researched and plotted as
well as being pleasingly compelling, despite its dark subject matter. Morrell
does not into gruesome detail; he rather transports the reader to the fog- and
pig-bound streets of long-ago London, seen through the eyes of believable,
fallible, and appealing characters—plus one murderer and one Machiavellian
politician, Lord Palmerston. Absolutely recommended. Read
More Here
In many ways, this highly entertaining thriller
recalls the Sherlock
Holmes tales. A fog is forever rolling in off the Thames; a giant “Malay”
with a turban turns up mysteriously; we travel to India to glimpse the British East
India Company trading opium for Chinese tea; De Quincey uses a ragged band of
teenaged “irregulars” as his eyes and ears. Moreover, De Quincey is smarter
than the police, has a laudanum addiction to match Holmes’s cocaine habit, and
has a companion who is as loyal as Dr. Watson but much prettier: his fiercely
independent 21-year-old daughter, Emily De Quincey.
Emily demonstrates her strength of mind not only by
standing up to authority but by insisting on wearing the controversial new
style of dress called bloomers. Quite a few men “looked with disapproval at
Emily’s unorthodox unhooped dress, in which the movement of her legs was
visible.” In her own defense, Emily points out that the hoops and necessary
undergarments can weigh 37 pounds. Given that, she says, along with the idiotic
idea that the ideal waist size for a woman is 18 inches, “it isn’t at all
surprising that many women faint.”
In addition to bloomers, Morrell spotlights several
innovations that are changing life in the mid-19th century, including the telegraph,
railroads, matches (called Lucifers) and the flush toilet, often called “the
necessary.”
Police work itself was in its infancy, with the first
London Police Department having begun in 1829. We meet the all-powerful home
secretary, Lord
Palmerston, who is quite willing to toss De Quincey in prison if that will
quiet the angry street mobs who will beat or kill anyone suspected of being the
mass murderer — particularly if the suspect’s Irish.
But don’t take the opinions of the critics on their own, why not sample an
extract of the novel which is available for download from the Hodder
and Stoughton website here [‘left click’ to read online or ‘right click’ and
‘save as’ to your hard drive]
I have been a long term
reader of David Morrell, and I discovered much about Morrell’s work when I
first met him at Bouchercon
Las Vegas in 2003, when we recorded a very lengthy interview which is
archived here part one
and part
two. So when I heard that David
was back in the UK to promote the UK release of MURDER AS A FINE ART as
well as research the follow-up, I packed my camera and head off to Dove
Cottage in Britain’s Lake District [operated by the Wordsworth Trust] to hear him
speak with fellow literature academic Grevel
Lindop. The talk was fascinating, with lively questions from the floor. We
learned that Morrell needed De Quincey to have a foil, a helper due to his
occasion intoxication from his beloved Alkaloid Laudanum, so Morrell used De
Quincey’s daughter Emily. Emily
De Quincey is a fascinating character that adds an exciting and amusing
dimension to the narrative.
Another interesting aspect is De Quincey’s
existential digressions, such as mention of Immanuel Kant’s
philosophical writings on the objective nature of reality. Morrell
indicated that De Quincey’s influence extended to Edgar
Allan Poe, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire and Nikolai
Gogol, and even major 20th-century writers such as Jorge
Luis Borges admired and claimed to be partly influenced by his work. If you
have read David Morrell’s work, you’ll see subtle influences in his own
characters; people who are troubled in the reality they find themselves in,
people in desperate situations like Thomas De Quincey.
So if you’re new to the work
of David Morrell, Shots eZine have organized a competition to coincide with the
release of MURDER AS A FINE ART by David Morrell in which we are giving away
three prizes –
First Prize a signed copy of
MURDER AS A FINE ART
And two runner prizes of
signed book plates by David Morrell
All you have to do is answer
the following question –
David Morrell’s debut novel
FIRST BLOOD featured the character [John] Rambo, can you tell us where the
genesis of the name Rambo came from?
[A] The name of an American
Aircraft
[b] The name of an American
Apple
[c] A brand of Canadian
Maple Syrup
[d] The maiden name of
Thomas De Quincey’s mother
All you have to do is email
the answer together with your name and postal address to shotscomp@yahoo.co.uk
and ensure you place ‘David Morrell MURDER AS A FINE ART’ in the subject line
of your email.
If you need a
hint, check out the Shots interview with David Morrell from a decade ago here with part one
and part
two available from our archives.
Terms and conditions for the Shots eZine / MURDER AS A
FINE ART competition
- Closing date for entries is Sunday 3rd November 2013
12:00:00 AM
- All correct entries will be entered into a prize draw
and the first correct answer picked at random on 3/11/2013 will be
declared the winner of the signed book, and the second and third name will
receive a signed bookplate.
- The winner will be notified by email within 14 days of
the promotion closing date and is required to accept their prize by email
or phone call within 14 days of notification.
- In the event of non-acceptance within the specified
period, the promoter reserves the right to reallocate the prize to the
next randomly drawn correct and valid entry.
- The winner will be notified within 28 days of the
closing date. No responsibility can be accepted for lost or misplaced
entries
- The prize is non-transferable and there is no cash
alternative
- Only one entry per person
- Incorrect or illegible answers or entries received
after the entry date will not be entered into the prize draw
- The judges decision is final and no correspondence will
be entered into
- No geographical restrictions apply
Good
Luck, but if you don’t win, you should explore the work of David Morrell and
his work which can be purchased from the Shots
Bookstore Here
Shots Ezine would like to
thank David Morrell, Grevel Lindop and Andrew Forster [and Carrie Taylor] of
the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere [The Lake District, UK] for their assistance in this
article.
If you wish to purchase a
hard copy, or an eBook via download of David
Morrell’s MURDER AS A FINE ART and wish to read more about the real life of
Thomas De Quincey in Grevel
Lindop’s THE OPIUM EATER [this is a 2012 revised text for eBook and iBook
only], or Robert
Morrison’s work on De Quincey – we would really appreciate you doing so
from the Shots Bookstore [links embedded above], as this supports the Shots
eZine operation which is a not-for-profit internet resource that promotes
crime, mystery and thriller fiction – we thank you in advance.
Further information on the
books mentioned in this article [or if you wish to visit Dove Cottage – part of
the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere] is available
by clicking the links below -
Photographs © 2013 A S Karim featuring -
David Morrell
Grevel Lindop
Andrew Forster
Amanda Lindop and Donna Morrell
Painting of Thomas De Quincey and daughter Emily
Bust of the late Robert Woof CBE first director of the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere
