The Angel: A Grand and Batchelor Victorian Mystery

Was Charles Dickens’s death on June 9, 1870, at his country retreat in Kent actually a murder? That’s the question facing enquiry agents Matthew Grand and James Batchelor in Trow’s ambitious if uneven third Victorian mystery (after The Circle). When George Sala, Dickens’s garrulous biographer, asks Grand and Batchelor, whose motto is “no stone unturned,” to investigate, they leap into action. Improbably, Dickens’s staff and family members are soon opening up to Grand and Batchelor, as the police grumble. Two men sharing lodgings in London, investigating crimes while enjoying an uneasy relationship with Scotland Yard, invites an obvious comparison to Holmes and Watson, but Grand and Batchelor fall short of Conan Doyle’s high standard. More successful is Trow’s arch and witty tone and a plunge into the delightfully cutthroat publishing scene of Victorian London, where all loudly mourn Dickens while privately saying that the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood definitely wasn’t his best. (Nov.)