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BLOOD ON THE WOOD
by Gillian Linscott
Virago, July 2003
311 pages
12.98 GBP
ISBN: 186049997X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Unlike most authors of series, Gillian Linscott does not proceed chronologically. This eleventh of her novels to feature militant suffragette Nell Bray is set around 1904 at a time of considerable political and cultural ferment in Great Britain. A supporter of Emmeline Pankhurst's WSPU has left a valuable painting to the movement, and Nell is dispatched to pick it up and take it off to Christie's for evaluation and auction. Nell is not happy about the job and is even less so when she learns she has been fobbed off with a copy of the original, a lush Odalisque by Boucher, rudely dubbed "Bessie Broadbeam" by Bobbie Fieldfare, who helps Nell return the copy.

Philomena Venn, the deceased owner of the painting and her husband Oliver were upper-middle-class radicals and strong supporters of the movement. Why then is Oliver behaving in so patently dishonest a way by withholding the genuine picture? When Nell makes her visit to Oxfordshire to pick up the Boucher, the Venn property is hosting a meeting of the newly-formed Scipians, an off-shoot of the Fabian society, and is thus a seething mass of vegetarians, pacifists, socialists, and assorted working-class intellectuals who are combining a week-end in the country with earnest political discussion enlivened by Morris dancing. Nell would rather have a good night's sleep, but she is startled, as is everyone else present, by David Venn's dramatic announcement of his engagement to Daisy, a red-haired fiddle player and poor country lass. The announcement is all the more dramatic as David, Philomena's son, is already engaged, to the much more suitable Felicia. Before we know it, Daisy is dead, David behind bars, and Nell up to her ears in the investigation.

What is admirable about all this is not only Linscott's deft handling of the mystery, so that she is able to spread suspicion over almost everyone involved, but her approach to the problems presented by the historical novel. Many readers recoil when they hear that a crime novel is historical, fearing (and rightly) large indigestible chunks of historical "fact" or worse, factoid, with a little bit of murder to make the history go down (Monfredo's Seneca Falls series is a prime example of this sort of approach). But Linscott not only knows her period, she knows why it ought to matter to the contemporary reader, not as fact but as feeling.

Britons in 1904 were gasping for change and hopeful of achieving it. Nor was it exclusively political change--Linscott here reminds us of the importance of the Arts and Crafts movement and the folk revival as part of a larger cultural shift. Modern readers may smile at the naivety, but cannot doubt the commitment or take pleasure in the failure. There is, as in the other books in this series, especially the later ones, a sense of brooding melancholy colouring the resolution. Like the 20th century itself, nothing begun is likely to end as well as one might have hoped. Highly recommended, as is the entire series.

This review is based on the original Virago edition, available in the UK and in Canada. A US edition has not been announced.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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