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Television dramatist Niall Leonard has contributed to a broad assortment of well-known programs, including BALLYKISSANGEL and MONARCH OF THE GLEN. To some readers, Leonard might be better known as the life partner of "E.L. James," author of the erotica bestseller FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY, which he has adapted for the silver screen. He has also written a gritty crime fiction trilogy, the Finn Maguire series.
Leonard's new novel M KING'S BODYGUARD is a different thing entirely. Inaugurating a new historical crime fiction series, M. KING'S BODYGUARD proves Leonard an insightful creator of neo-Victorian culture and atmosphere.
Eschewing neo-Victorian cliches such as the too-perfect proto-feminist New Woman without any female friends and the Holmes-and-Watson-like detecting duo, Leonard finds originality in recycling. Specifically, he dredges up Det. Chief Supt. William Melville (1850-1918), founder of the Secret Service, and makes Melville his procedural protagonist. Take that, Sherlock Holmes.
An intelligent but often unscrupulous and deeply unlikeable fellow, Melville aims to serve and to protect an even more unlikeable fellow, King Edward VII, a.k,a, "Bertie," dissolute son of Queen Victoria. In the immediate wake of Bertie's mother's not unexpected death, Melville must keep the new king in line while identifying threats to his life and to public order.
Quickly, such a threat crops up in the form of an apparent cell of continental anarchists bent upon assassination. They seem to target not Bertie, but his visiting cousin, the impetuous young Kaiser of the relatively new country of Germany.
Melville obtains information from an Italian immigrant who has fallen into prostitution, whose story no one else would believe, but to take down the anarchists, he must also collaborate with his counterpart, a German secret agent. Can this decidedly incompatible duo control their own hostilities well enough to save both their nations?
Leonard succeeds in making this material seem fresh and suspenseful mostly on account of his honesty about what Melville's beliefs, loyalties, and methods actually were. He is not a good cop and he absolutely believes that the ends justify the means.
He's not a bad apple, either: he's indicative of the policing culture that fostered him, and that he resolutely upholds. "Cracked many heads this week?" a despised informant prods him. "I have not," Melville replies: "sure I employ people to do that for me."
Despite this smug complacency, Melville is aware that his world is endangered, not by Victoria's death but by the general pressures of modernity, including, ominously, events that the audience will recognize as leading to the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
Moreover, as a (Northern) Irish subject of the British Empire, Melville experiences alienation in Victorian Britain and is very ambivalent about how to react. He "despises ... the Fenians," believing "their goal is to smash society and forge it anew," but finds himself "star[ing] through my reflection into the murk of night," and not only in the literal sense. Melville's loyalties -- primarily to his dead queen and her culture -- are intense but incredibly fragile.
I look forward to seeing how Leonard chooses to develop Melville and his messy, doomed world.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is co-editor of Reviewing the Evidence and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She has reviewed for RTE since 2004.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, May 2021
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