Mysteries and their close relative, thrillers, form a complicated and diverse genre, with fashions and tastes changing every few decades. Hard drinking guys prowling mean streets give way to feminist gals with cynical eyes who are displaced by tormented souls who interrupt existential angst for a little criminology. We have golden age cozies that return, sometimes in curious forms with clever pets, and we currently have some super rational detectives, those descendants of Sherlock in his scientific mode.
What procedural is without its forensic crew with their microscopes and chemicals, their fingertip searches and studies of fibers and dust and bodily fluids? Electronics, the net, social media, and video surveillance provide clues even the great Holmes never imagined. Detection is going scientific with, at least for consumers of mystery fiction, mixed results.
After all, how exciting are screens full of phone numbers or fuzzy CCTV footage or test tubes slowly turning colors? Fortunately one aspect of forensics remains as dramatic as it was when it made its Renaissance debut. I refer to the autopsy and to the forensic pathologists, like Dr. Quirke, the TV crew of Silent Witness, and now Dr. Cuthbert, who recently made his American debut in Allan Gaw's The Silent House of Sleep.
Cuthbert learned his trade in Edinburgh, which can claim to be instrumental in both forensics and mysteries, the university's famous Dr. Joseph Bell having been Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. Cuthbert's fictional mentor, Dr. Littlejohn is very much in Bell's mold, emphasizing careful observation, meticulous preparation, and detailed records.
Littlejohn also emphasizes the forensic pathologist's precise role: to provide police with information. He is to discover scientific information, not to solve crimes or conduct investigations outside the laboratory.
A nice division of labor, and one that suits Dr. Cuthbert, who suffers from what his contemporaries called "shell shock" and what we know as post traumatic syndrome. He certainly has his reasons, having served in the trenches at Ypres on the Western Front. Gaw interweaves scenes from this devastating experience with Cuthbert's life fourteen years later as a senior pathologist in London.
I found this structure a bit disruptive initially, but I must admit it results in a fine payoff later in the novel, and both the horrors of the trenches and the exceedingly nasty case that becomes Dr. Cuthbert's focus are vividly presented and thematically related.
The novel's important characters are well delineated, too, and I can see them forming the nucleus of an interesting mystery series. (Gaw has written three others, and Mysterious Press promises to issue another Cuthbert mystery in '27.) We have the originally hostile, but very capable, Chief Inspector Mowbray; the considerably friendlier D.S. Baker, Cuthbert's formidable housekeeper, Marie Smith, a former war refugee from Belgium, and his eager assistant, Simon Morganthal.
Cuthbert and his police colleagues need all their resources when they are presented with two bodies that have been tied together and buried, naked and without identification, in a London park. Dr. Cuthbert begins extremely detailed postmortem, and it looks for a while as if the pathologist will be able to stick to his science.
But his own troubled mind, the memories of the trenches and of the man he loved, and the whole messy human dimension of the case intrude. Dr. Cuthbert proves to be equally observant outside the mortuary, and he is soon employing all his considerable intellectual, educational, and personal resources on the case.
Just as well. The mortuary and the doctor's increasingly well-equipped laboratory can reveal a sequence of events. But human motivation and the monstrosities of human imagination are much harder to measure or understand. Pure reason is a dream and for many of the characters there is no escape from the disasters of the Great War nor for confronting the human dimension of forensic puzzles.
The Silent House of Sleep is easy to admire in many ways, but the truly horrible crime and the even greater horrors of the war do not make for enjoyable reading. Gaw, himself a doctor, clearly knows forensic pathology and he is an effective writer. It will be interesting to see how much Dr. Cuthbert can recover from the war and what sort of cases he will handle in the future.
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| Dr. Allan Gaw |
