The Last Pleasure Garden by
Lee Jackson
hbk out April 06
Published by Heinemann
at £12.99
A Victorian 'whodunnit' with a very authentic touch, conveying the
atmosphere of London around 1870, with its gaslights, horse cabs,
artificially elegant manners and hypocrisy.
The plot centres around the last surviving pleasure ground, Cremorne
Gardens on the Chelsea riverside, which sounds much like Copenhagen's
Tivoli. A private pleasure park, it has acres of entertainment in various
pavilions, with bands and dancing and is very popular with the young
bloods of London and their girl-friends. However, inevitably there is
drunkenness and loose women as a by-product and the more up-market
residents of nearby streets are trying to get it closed as a hot-bed of
licentiousness and immorality. Their campaign is fanned by the Reverend
Featherstone and his wife from a local Christian Training College, who
plague the owner of the Gardens.
One of the genteel local families has a daughter, Rose Perfitt, a pretty girl
who seems fascinated by the Gardens and creeps out at night to visit it.
The attraction is a man recently released on parole from prison and from
there the plot thickens, with a series of murders attributed to a mystery
man who snips locks of hair from women in the Gardens which a rather
dour detective, Inspector Decimus Webb has to investigate.
The book has an excellent twist in the tail and along the way there is a lot
of information about the seedier side of Victorian life, including baby-
farming. The text is written in third-person present-tense, a recent fad
which does not appeal to me, though I admit one soon gets used to it.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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The Last Pleasure Garden by
Lee Jackson
