White Stone Day

Literature & Fiction

Gray, John MacLachlan

Genre Fiction

Arrow Books, Ltd.

It's 1852, and the ranks of the London poor have doubled. In the swollen shadow of the great St. Giles Rookery, fallen women attract the perfumed dandies of the West End into a vicious circle of venality, vanity, and vice. Edmund Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, the city's second-best sensational tabloid, writes whatever will stimulate the reader, delay his (increasingly physical) creditors, and supply him with the alcohol and opiates required to see him through the day. His most recent triumph was to supply a name for the fiend in human form who has murdered an uncertain number of prostitutes with a white silk scarf: Chokee Bill. Chokee Bill incited a garroting panic that paralyzed the business of London---until the arrest of one William Ryan. Normality has returned. The hangman, Mr. Calcraft, as dusty and dreary as death itself, awaits. Broke again and in search of crisp copy, Whitty makes a shocking but not altogether surprising discovery: the white-scarf slayings have continued. When he endeavors to find the real Chokee Bill, he is greeted with emphatic hostility on all sides. This thrilling Dickensian tale offers galvanizing suspense and an evocative and witty vision of life in Victorian London.

The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller (Edward Whitty, 1)

United States

Minotaur Books

"I mark this day most especially with a White Stone." ---Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll Edmund Whitty, a London newspaper correspondent who can usually be counted upon for crisp and lurid copy, has fallen upon lean times. After his triumphant exposé of a notorious serial killer, he has inexplicably lost his knack for sensational reporting. Broke and desperate, he seizes upon a generous offer from a mysterious American to discredit a quack psychic. But how, he ends up wondering uneasily, does the psychic know so much about a scandal involving Whitty's late brother? When the psychic is brutally murdered, Whitty finds himself accused of the crime and thrown into Milbank prison, the most bizarre institution of its kind in England. Help comes unexpectedly from "the Captain," a gangster not known for charity work. To save his own skin, Whitty must find the men responsible for the disappearance of the Captain's young niece, Eliza. Whitty's search takes him to Oxford, where he meets the brilliant and eccentric Reverend William Boltbyn, a renowned children's author who delights in playing croquet, devising elaborate stories, and taking artistic photographs of little girls. There he uncovers a looking-glass world, the dark side of Victoriana, and the murder of innocence. John MacLachlan Gray, who evoked "the mean streets and byways of 1852 London with a skill worthy of Dickens" (Publishers Weekly) in The Fiend in Human, spins an even more irresistible tale of dark secrets behind the facade of Victorian respectability.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

It's 1852, and the ranks of the London poor have doubled. In the swollen shadow of the great St. Giles Rookery, fallen women attract the perfumed dandies of the West End into a vicious circle of venality, vanity, and vice. Edmund Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, the city's second-best sensational tabloid, writes whatever will stimulate the reader, delay his (increasingly physical) creditors, and supply him with the alcohol and opiates required to see him through the day. His most recent triumph was to supply a name for the fiend in human form who has murdered an uncertain number of prostitutes with a white silk scarf: Chokee Bill. Chokee Bill incited a garroting panic that paralyzed the business of London---until the arrest of one William Ryan. Normality has returned. The hangman, Mr. Calcraft, as dusty and dreary as death itself, awaits. Broke again and in search of crisp copy, Whitty makes a shocking but not altogether surprising discovery: the white-scarf slayings have continued. When he endeavors to find the real Chokee Bill, he is greeted with emphatic hostility on all sides. This thrilling Dickensian tale offers galvanizing suspense and an evocative and witty vision of life in Victorian London.

The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller

Contemporary

St. Martin's: Griffin

On a rust-bucket cargo ship bound from Liverpool to the United States in 1848, an Irish stowaway named Devlin steals a suspicious package after witnessing it changing hands between two sea captains. All he finds is a seemingly worthless pile of papers marked “David Copperfield, Final Four Numbers, by Charles Dickens.” Devlin is determined to see if he can somehow turn events to his advantage by paying a call on Dickens’s American publisher. A year later, a newly admitted patient to a Baltimore hospital, a disreputable writer who goes by the name of Edgar Allan Poe, is clearly raving mad, which makes it easy to dismiss his claims to have information about the murder of an innocent woman. 
Meanwhile, the eminent English novelist Charles Dickens has embarked on a tour of America, where his views are not received as he would have wished. Dickens’s growing discomfort reaches new heights of intensity when he finds himself sharing disreputable lodgings---and reluctantly collaborating with---none other than Edgar Allan Poe, who has gone into hiding after faking his own death in a desperate attempt to escape the Irish mob.
Like White Stone Day, which The Washington Post hailed as “a Dickens of a thriller,” this is a brilliantly imaginative tale in which crime and literature intersect in surprising ways.

Not Quite Dead

Fiend in Human, The

Century Pub.Co.

London, 1852: the world's capital city of crime; a city where murder and hangings are public entertainment, where reporters and balladeers vie with one another to be first to the next grisly, exclusive revelation. Among the panoply of killers awaiting execution is Chokee Bill, whose stranglings have set the capital abuzz. One of the balladeers, Henry Owler, is determined to extract a true confession from the killer. However, Chokee Bill claims he is innocent and that the real Fiend is still on the loose. Owler, enlists the help of one of London's leading investigative journalists, Edmund Whitty of the Falcon, to help him to discover the real murderer before he strikes again. But fate has some other twists in store. The killer is closer than either one expects, close enough to touch in the fog bound streets. Is he a wraith of the imagination? Or is he the nightmare the public have dreamed and now made all too real? Is he The Fiend in Human Form?

The Fiend in Human

Century

Vancouver is in an uproar over the death by gunshot of a Scottish nanny, Janet Stewart. An almost deliberately ham-handed police investigation has Constable Hook suspecting a cover-up. The powerful United Council of Scottish Societies is demanding an inquiry. The killing has become a political issue with an election not far away. The city is buzzing with rumours. Miss Stewart's fellow nannies have accused the Chinese houseboy of murder, capitalizing on a wave of anti-Chinese propaganda led by the Asian Exclusion League and enthusiastically supported by the sensational press--not to mention the Ku Klux Klan, which has taken up residence in upperclass Shaughnessy. The White Angel is a work of fiction inspired by the cold case of Janet Smith, who, on July 26, 1924, was found dead in her employer's posh Shaughnessy Heights mansion. A dubious investigation led to the even more dubious conclusion that Smith died by suicide. After a public outcry, the case was re-examined and it was decided that Smith was in fact murdered; but no one was ever convicted, though suspects abounded--from an infatuated Chinese houseboy to a drug-smuggling ring, devil-worshippers from the United States, or perhaps even the Prince of Wales. For Vancouver, the killing created a situation analogous to lifting a large flat rock to expose the creatures hiding underneath. An exploration of true crime through a literary lens, The White Angel draws an artful portrait of Vancouver in 1924 in all its opium-hazed, smog-choked, rain-soaked glory--accurate, insightful and darkly droll.

The White Angel

British & Irish

Douglas&McIntyre

An exhilarating page-turner set in 1920s Vancouver post prohibition, when liquor was the fuel driving big business, big government--and major crime. In this spellbinding follow-up to his mystery The White Angel, John MacLachlan Gray captures the spirit of Vancouver in those gritty, gin-soaked days, as the city was remaking itself between wars. Alcohol is once again legal in Vancouver after the failed experiment of prohibition, but pro-temperance sentiments remain strong. Politicians like Attorney General Gordon Cunning attempt appeasement by establishing the Liquor Control Board, which oversees supply, from the lofty circles of power down to bleak public drinking factories called "beer parlours." But when Cunning is found deceased, an empty martini glass at his side, quickly followed by Mrs. Harlan Crombie, the wife of a prominent bureaucrat, who falls dead after an afternoon book club meeting, suspicions are raised. Is it pure coincidence that the deceased were both drinking the same brand of "tonic"? Or is it a spillover from American prohibition, where deliberately tainted booze is killing thousands? Fans of The White Angel will be delighted by the return of straight-shooting constable Calvin Hook, frustrated poet-cum-reporter Ed McCurdy and unpredictable, eavesdropping telephone operator Mildred Wickstram, as they pool their skills in order to get to the truth. The result is a clash between temperance activists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Liquor Control Board and global events on the mean streets of Vancouver--a rough little city on the edge of empire.

Vile Spirits

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gray, John MacLachlan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gray, John MacLachlan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gray, John MacLachlan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

White Stone Day

The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller (Edward Whitty, 1)

White Stone Day

The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller

Not Quite Dead

Fiend in Human, The

The Fiend in Human

The White Angel

The White Angel

Vile Spirits