A Christmas Journey by
Anne Perry
hbk out November 03
Published by Headline
at £12.99
Correctly described on the jacket as 'A Christmas novella', this is a very
small book and in spite of the undoubted fame of the author and the
excellent quality of the story, I wonder who is going to shell out thirteen
pounds for 124 pages, for it is really a longish short story.
Anne Perry is best known for her Victorian mysteries and has indeed been
compared with Dickens himself. Most of her many books have been either
about Inspector Pitt or the William and Hester Monk series, though currently
she is into a set of five novels set at the time of the First Great War.
In The Christmas Journey she brings back her heroine from the Pitt stories,
Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, a society beauty with a penchant for
becoming involved in homicide.
At a pre-Christmas weekend at a stately home, an attractive young widow,
about to get engaged to an eligible gent, apparently commits suicide by
jumping into the lake. This follows a snide remark by another widow who
has her eye on the same fellow and she gets the blame from assembled
aristocracy. The host tries to avert her social ostracism, which in those days
was a living death, by charging her with travelling to Inverness to take a
letter from the dead woman to her mother and confess what happened.
Getting to Scotland in winter weather in 1852 was like a Polar expedition
and Lady Vespasia feels obliged to accompany her. When they reach
Inverness, the mother has gone and they follow her by carriage, boat and
horse to the remote fastnesses of western Scotland.
The tale is redolent with Victorian atmosphere, from the hypocritical
snobbishness to the rigid social conventions of the time. The quality of the
writing shows why one of Anne Perry's Pitt series was made into a
successful ITV drama, The Cater Street Hangman.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
A Christmas Journey by
Anne Perry
