WHEN ES Thomson published as Elaine di Rollo, she gave us two superbly drawn portraits of the mid-nineteenth century and post-First World War periods, in The Peachmaker’s Almanac and Bleakly Hall respectively. With this third novel written under another name, one must ask what she has jettisoned from her previous publishing life, and what she has taken up.

Beloved Poison is set, like her debut, in the mid-Victorian period, and also draws on Thomson’s PhD topic, the history of medicine. A more obvious and perhaps more conventional mystery, it’s concerned with the murder of a doctor at St Saviour’s, a London hospital which is in the stages of gradual destruction. We can still enjoy Thomson’s superbly rich characterisation, Dickensian in its relish of the quirky, as well as her expert handling of period detail. But she relinquishes the gentle comic tone of her previous novels for something darker and more disturbing here.

Is this small but significant shift in direction for Thomson a compromising one? The comic tone suited her earlier writing supremely well, but hers was always a darker kind of comedy. By privileging the darkness here, she has merely brought out what was always there in her depiction of the world anyway, just a little more buried by the laughter.

That comic background means her dark depiction of medicine midway during Victoria’s reign has a useful knowingness about it, one that we modern readers can appreciate: this is a world of under-age prostitutes, child vagrants, oppressed wives and lonely husbands, the kind of world Dickens depicted. But it’s also a world we’re viewing from our place in the future, and we’re aware of its clichés, its stereotypes.

And so, in a nod to our 21st century awareness, Thomson’s central protagonist, her investigator of the murder mystery, is both man and woman. Jem Flockhart is born a girl but at the age of seven, her widowed father, the apothecary at St Saviour’s, decides to raise her as a boy. Her androgynous appearance is compounded, perhaps, by the extensive birthmark on her face. As Jem and others note, her face is more of a mask for her than for most of us.

St Saviour’s itself is a distortion of a hospital: crumbling walls and filthy floors, doctors vying with one another for supremacy, dubious practices and of course, secrets hidden in dark and creepy corners. Dr Magorian is the lead surgeon, but Dr Graves, the one who most relishes hacking up bodies, has ambitions of his own, and the handsome, promiscuous, amoral Dr Bain is the reformer. Thomson builds up a handy set of suspects before Bain is found murdered: he has had affairs with half the doctors’ wives, regularly attends a local brothel, and might well have set his sights on the innocent young daughter of his boss, Eliza Magorian.

Jem is a natural investigator: an outsider on account of her disfigurement, as well as being a woman in the guise of a man, she can move about without being noticed while she also displays a natural curiosity about the world and a concern for natural justice. When the novel begins, Will Quartermain is the stranger who calls: he is a junior architect with the railway company that wants to pull down the decaying hospital to make way for a railway bridge. His relationship with Jem proves to be one of the focal points of the novel as he represents a kind of macabre progress, overseeing the digging up of graves behind the hospital. When he and Jem come upon a series of tiny coffins containing bloodstained remains and materials, their discovery mirrors in a gruesome way what the railway company is doing.

There is also a lovely mirroring in the father-daughter relationships on display. Jem misses a father’s love from her secretive, aloof father; Eliza turns her face away from the slightest sign of affection from Dr Magorian. Both these daughters hold more secrets than they know; they are the counterpoint to a male possession of the world, they are the slippery legacy of male ambition, and of the need to produce the next generation. Thomson ties all of these themes and plotlines together with elegance, assurance and on occasion, something like brilliance. A historical novel to be savoured.


Beloved Poison: A Novel by ES Thomson (Constable, £14.99)