The Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon

The Queen of Bedlam
by Robert McCammon
Pocket Books, 2007
978-1-4165-7157-5
eBook, 655 pages
Historical Fiction/Mystery

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It’s 1702 and Matthew Corbett has been working as a personal secretary to Magistrate Nathaniel Powers of New York. When his employer suddenly announces he is retiring and sends the young man on an arranged job interview, Matthew realizes he has allowed himself to become complacent about his future. A growing town of approximately 5,000 people, the promise represented by New York is being considered by many: businessmen, financiers, politicians and criminals. Matthew now realizes he will have to do the same. So, when he’s offered a position with the Herrald Agency, perhaps the first private investigators to set up shop in the Colonies, Matthew recognizes it as a serious opportunity for which he is well suited.

(For those of you who don’t know, Matthew Corbett was introduced in 2002 in a two-volume suspense novel called Speaks The Nightbird. Working as a scrivener-apprentice to Isaac Woodward, a magistrate in Carolina, the two men came to the village of Fount Royal to investigate the charges against Rachel Howarth, who apparently was a witch who killed her husband, a man of the cloth. No one but Matthew believed the woman innocent, and he had to single-handedly solve the murder in order to save Rachel from burning at the stake.)

Now, as Matthew Corbett embarks on his new career, he has three more mysteries to solve…

1. Discover the identity of the fiend New York’s printer of the Earwig (A 2 page rag that passes for a newspaper) has dubbed The Masker. Matthew was intent on solving this particular puzzle even before becoming a detective. But he’s given extra incentive by the widow of one of the victims, who offers him 10 shillings to track down the killer. His new employer is also interested in how Matthew will perform with respect to such a dangerous case.

2. Prove that  Eben Ausley, the headmaster of the local orphanage, has been abusing boys for many years. Matthew spent his childhood at this institution and knows the man is a monster.

3. Complete an agency job which requires that he and his new mentor, Hudson Greathouse, discover the identity of a long-time mental patient known only as The Queen Of Bedlam.

Using the tools of his time, Matthew unwittingly chases after a criminal mastermind so foul one can almost sense the detective will fail. And as we follow our hero through a cast of interesting characters (Matthew’s new mentor, Hudson Greathouse, who is what we, today, would call a mercenary; Zed, the hulking, tongueless slave who works for the city’s strange coroner; even the new Governor, who dresses in women’s clothing in deference to his cousin the Queen), McCammon also paints us a vivid picture what it must have been like to be at the birth of a new century and her greatest city.

I’ve read all four books in the Matthew Corbett series, and I have to say The Queen of Bedlam is my favourite. Robert McCammon takes three seemingly unrelated crimes and turns them into a sinister operation of epic proportions (and makes it seem easy to do). Dropped into the middle of this nightmare is the refreshing hero, Matthew Corbett, who is such a perfectly drawn character he has become a good friend to me. Now, add in meticulous and often surprising descriptions of New York city in its infancy and you have an historical novel of suspense like none other.

The reader will have great fun as McCammon masterfully weaves the many threads of his mystery, creates a fictional world with great skill and still manages to keep some of the playfulness you can find in some of his earlier works. Perhaps the reader will also be excited about the recent release of the fourth Corbett novel, Mister Slaughter.


Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2010

Mister Slaughter by Robert McCammon

This review contains spoilers.



Mister Slaughter
by Robert McCammon
Subterranean Press, Jan 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59606-276-4
Hardcover
440 pages
Historical Fiction/Crime/Thriller

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Matthew Corbett is back. The quick-witted hero of Speaks The Nightbird and The Queen of Bedlam is now a New York investigator of some renown. He’s also a man marked for death by the elusive, master criminal Professor Fell.

When Matthew Corbett and his mentor, Hudson Greathouse, are assigned by Governor Lord Cornbury to collect Tyranthus Slaughter from the colonial asylum known as Bedlam, they aren’t happy about it. But £5 to escort a killer back to New York is just too much money to turn down.

“Mister” Slaughter, as he prefers to be called, is a man of many faces and a serial killer who makes today’s celluloid villains pale in comparison. When Mister Slaughter offers Greathouse and Corbett a treasure in exchange for his freedom, the men should have bound his mouth and whipped the horses. But Greathouse has a noble thing he wishes to accomplish and no money to do it with. He convinces Corbett to take Mister Slaughter up on his offer. After all, they have no intention of letting the madman go free.

But the two investigators underestimate Mister Slaughter’s ability to plant seeds of evil far in advance and patiently wait for those seeds to grow and bear fruit. Not only do the two men get cheated out of their treasure, Mister Slaughter manages to arm himself, seriously injure Greathouse, incapacitate Corbett and escape.

Rescued from their dire circumstances by Indians, Greathouse finds treatment for his wounds, while Corbett manages to acquire the services of the village outcast as a tracker.

Soon the adversaries are pursuing each other through the wilderness. A portrayal of a deadly serious and horrific game, this part of the book is real entertainment. Particularly, the few settlers who make their homes in the area have the gruesome misfortune of meeting Mister Slaughter, and we, the readers, finally see the fiend revealed. There’s also a night-time battle between the killer, Corbett and his guide, which is especially thrilling.

As the chase moves ever closer to civilization, Corbett, who has a secret he feels makes him responsible for the killer’s escape, experiences a gradual breakdown of his mental and physical abilities. It would seem that Mister Slaughter is unstoppable.

Corbett is poised on the brink of defeat when the two come upon a small village, so he plays his one last card: a name he remembers. In doing so, the young investigator stumbles across a connection between Mister Slaughter and a local business woman. While this puts him back on the killer’s trail, it also brings Corbett into greater conflict with the chilling Professor Fell.

The final meeting of Corbett and Mister Slaughter involves so many disturbing and complicated story lines, one has no choice but to rip through the pages of this unique and gritty thriller in order to find out if the horror being suggested is actually true.

Mister Slaughter is Robert McCammon doing what he does best. His descriptive abilities take us back to a world that is a composite of 30 some years of development in New York City (1700-1730). His characters, always larger than life and ever so quirky, never cease to entertain. And his story is complicated enough that Matthew Corbett can proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.

I noticed another reviewer complaining about McCammon’s overuse of cliffhangers (based on wordplay) in Mister Slaughter. I say the same thing to this critic as I did to the one who criticized the author’s over-the-top approach to character development in The Wolf’s Hour. It’s good to see a writer having fun and playing with his audience. McCammon’s willingness to play and experiment in his writing happens to be one of the reasons I’m a fan. Good for you, sir. And I hope to see much more from you in the future.


Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2009

A Story from the Grave

Stieg Larsson was a political journalist and graphics specialist for 20 years at a Swedish news agency. He also actively belonged to an organization called Expo, dedicated to fighting fascism and racism in Sweden and Europe. It’s said that he and his partner Eva Gabrielsson lived under constant threat from right-wing/neo-fascist violence. Larsson died of a heart-attack in 2004, a few months before the Swedish release of the first of three novels dedicated to the unusual character Lisbeth Salander.




The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Viking Canada, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-06901-9
465 pages
Hardcover
Crime/Mystery

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Lisbeth Salander is a 24-year-old bisexual, super-intelligent, violent, social and moral deviant who is a ward of the court. She also happens to be one of the top three computer hackers in Sweden. It’s through this capacity, employed by an investigative and research company, that Lisbeth meets Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, a recently disgraced investigative reporter (in the financial industry) who’s involved in two very interesting projects.

Blomkvist is seeking revenge on an industrialist named Wennerström, and, in exchange for much needed dirt on the man, he has also agreed to investigate the disappearance of one Harriet Vanger forty years ago.

Vanger vanished from a secluded island compound owned by her powerful family. A body was never found, there are no witnesses and no evidence of a crime exists: the problem appears to be identical to the “locked-room murder mystery” that crime-fiction buffs love. And the only thing Harriet’s uncle, Henrik Vanger, will say with any conviction is that he fears she was murdered by someone in his own family.

Together, Blomkvist and Salander sift through the history of an extremely dysfunctional family until they stumble upon something so terrible it could destroy everyone involved.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo reads like two stories in one: the struggle of Kalle Blomkvist to put his shattered life back together, and the character study of Lisbeth Salander. Both of these stories are hung on the mystery represented by Harriet Vanger. Yet, none of this is true, and the author spells it out quite clearly…

Stieg Larsson was adamantly opposed to violence against women. This is what the book is about. The novel is full of such violence and explores, quite controversially, the role of the victim. Second, each part of the book begins with a statistic regarding violence against women in Sweden. Third, the original title of the book was Men Who Hate Women. Fourth, and this is my own opinion, Larsson also uses the book to highlight the casual regard many Europeans have for sex. He doesn’t make a noticeable statement about this; one must question each sexual encounter in the book to arrive at the conclusion that the author is trying to point something out. What that something might be, I’ll leave for you to decide.

I just hope you don’t think, like one critic of the book, that the sex scenes are gratuitous. Nothing in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is gratuitous: this is well-written fiction with very strong messages. I suspect some rather abrupt transitions and questionable grammatical choices are the fault of the translator, not the author. And even though the narrator is too often noticeable in the story, the novel is an international best seller for a reason: the messages contained within the covers of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo resonate with the reader.


Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2009