Tangled Web UK Review August 2003
The American Boy by
Andrew Taylor
pbk out February 08
(Harper Perennial)
at £7.99
Andrew Taylor is a superb writer and one of his talents is versatility. Though probably best
known for his Lydford mysteries, set in the nineteen-fifties, the action of The American Boy takes
place in 1819. Written in the first person, the style and vocabulary are startlingly authentic for the
period and it is hard to accept that the text was written in the 21st century.
The American boy in question is Edgar Allan Poe, though in spite of the author's historical
postcript arguing for his central role in the story, I felt that he was somewhat of a marginal
character in the complicated and intriguing plot.
It is a big book, approaching five hundred pages, the turning of each one a pleasure of
anticipation. The narrator and central character is Thomas Shields, a wounded veteran of
Waterloo, who fallen on hard times, manages to get a job as an assistant master in a seedy private
school in a London suburb. Amongst his pupils is Edgar and his friend Charlie Frant, son of a
wealthy banker. Shields is sent by the school to the Frant house, where he becomes enamoured of
Sophie, Charlie's mother, though he is treated as a servant by the father and a business associate,
Stephen Carswall.
Frant's bank collapses and he is found murdered, when Carswall takes Sophie under his
protection and the action shifts to Carswall's large mansion in Gloucestershire, where Shield's
relations with both Sophie and Carswall's flirtatious daughter lead him into deep waters.
As the machinations of the story become more complex, Shields gains knowledge about the main
players that makes him increasingly vulnerable and the later part of the book sees the hero in dire
danger.
As well as being a compelling story, the strength of the book lies in the masterly way in which
Andrew Taylor creates the ambience of the late Georgian period, both in dialogue and
description. The spurious morality of the early nineteenth century is well portrayed, where it
was a scandal for a lady to be alone in the same room with a man, as is the crushing poverty and
cruelty suffered by the lower classes, who were often treated worse than the aristocracy's domestic
animals, with maiming man-traps set for poachers and servants flogged for trivial misdeeds.
This is a crime novel, but is far more than that, being a saga of frustrated love, gross class-
distinction and the arrogance fostered by wealth and social status. Andrew Taylor recently won
the Ellis Peters Historical Award and with a book like The American Boy, deserves to win it
again.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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