Bleeding Heart Square [Hardcover]

 

 

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Here is a page-turner of a psychological thriller that will have the reader guessing as to who, why and how right up to the end. The setting for this modern-Gothic, old-country crime novel is the deep dark shadowy parts of a London of the 1930s that most people have forgotten about, with a tentative connection to the past with the English countryside a few miles removed to the west. What looks like mundane and uninteresting to start with quickly becomes a complex murder investigation and a trip back in time for a number of parties interested in establishing the truth. A woman has been forced to abandon her marriage and ends up in a flop house at Bleeding Heart Square with her father, a dissolute old sea captain. Her estranged husband, meanwhile, has joined Oliver Mosley's Black Shirts. Hanging over No. 7 Bleeding Square - a place immersed in a colorful history of its own - is a mystery involving a Miss Penhow who vanished a few years before. While circumstances surrounding her disappearance seem to point in the direction of her husband, Serridge, this tragedy is entwined in numerous other complexities that have to be resolved before the crime can be solved. This is Taylor at his best: building a very involved plot that requires the reader to pull things together from a considerable distance in order to understand that crime travels through time and space. While Bleeding Heart Square is the central operating spot for the story, with all sorts of mysterious goings-on like animal organs arriving in the mail for its owner, Serridge, the reader is advised to heed the past, as revealed in the musings of the Penhow diary. Disturbing clues emerge to show that life at Serridge's Bleeding Heart Square has a sinister connection to the past that comes from the depths of one man's sexual depravity. The injustices of a former life somewhere in the countryside need to be dealt with if life is to move on inside the heart of the city. A lot of things eventually get put right in this story. Taylor makes a strong case for the individual's conscience becoming the means by which justice is served on those who would maliciously harm others.

Escaping the clutches of her abusive husband, Marcus the wealthy and privileged Lydia Langston flees to the relative security of Bleeding Heart Square, a ramshackle series of flats hidden away in Central London where the mysterious legend of the bleeding heart still reverberates. It is here that Lydia stays with her drunken and dispirited father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis with his "bloodshot eyes and blotched and wrinkled skin" who is reluctant to take her privileged daughter in suitably subdued circumstances. A nice girl who up until now has had servants to cater to her every need, Lydia finds herself slipping into a whole new routine as she learns how to cook and clean and look after herself while at night finding solace in reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own by the fireside.

It is here at Bleeding Heart Square that Lydia gets involved with a variety of different characters all driven by desperation, greed, revenge and desire, and money, each with their own agendas with the vulnerable figure of Lydia suddenly at the center of it all even as she seems content, for the moment at least, to turn her back on privilege. The building once belonged to the vulnerable and needy Miss Philippa Penhow, a middle-aged spinster who has apparently vanished, rumored to have met an old boyfriend and left for new life in America. All that is left is her mysterious diary, containing frantic jottings of her courtship and hastily arranged transfer of her funds to Bleeding Heart Square's current landlord Joseph Serridge.

While the formidable Serridge obviously had his own an agenda, reportedly wowing Philippa Penhow with promises of love and romance beyond her wildest imaginings: "Her rosy spectacles were so thick that she was the next best thing to blind." Miss Penhow attracted Serridge with her considerable wealth and the possibilities of owning a farm in the village of Rawling, in the country of Essex on the Herefordshire border. But it is Lydia, increasingly unencumbered by her wealth who is driven to find out more about the strange affair between Philippa and Serridge even as Bleeding Heart Square begins to smell quite literally of blood.

With a plot that hinges on a poor, desperate woman's diary, the mysterious draft of a business letter, parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, for J Serridge Esq., and the charred fragments of a small black notebook, Lydia, and the down-on his-luck copy editor and fellow tenant Rory Wentwood begin to unravel the complicated layers of connections where the devil seems to be alive and well and dividing his time between Mortham Farm and Bleeding Heart Square. As Lydia becomes overwhelmed by all the apparent coincidences, Andrew Taylor contrives an almost Dickensian plot with London constantly filled in a gray light, " a dispirited kind that is worse than darkness." From the dank tea shops and the streets of Spittlefield where the rank smell of raw meat constantly hangs in the smoky air, the novel seethes with the separated, and the broken-hearted, the cruel and rapacious and a colorful cast of eccentrics from naïve the country folk to the city's class-conscious wealthy and to those determined to take part in the bourgeoning fascist movement. Meanwhile, the legend of Bleeding Heart Square remains stalwart throughout and that of a ball at which the devil once appeared, dressed as a gentleman, dancing away with the lady of the house. In a story where real live hearts are rumored to remain, restless and yearning, broken and bleeding, Lydia's investigations are full of surprises, the final revelations of what really happened to Philippa Penhow as startling as they are surprising. Mike Leonard 2009.

Reason for Reading: The book sounded perfect for me: a British historical mystery set in the thirties which the blurbs assured me was "beautifully crafted".

I have found myself a new favourite author! After reading this book, I want to get my hands on anything else by this man. This is a clever book, very intelligently crafted and written with a literary flair. His combination of mystery and history is absolutely superb.

There is so much story here and a mystery that morphs itself in so many directions it's nearly impossible to give a summery. The publisher's don't even bother to try with their brief blurb on the back of my trade pb edition. What can I tell you? Lydia Langstone is an upperclass woman who walks out on her husband because he hits her. She ends up a #7 Bleeding Heart Square, a boarding house, where her Father, a drunk, but jovial sort of fellow when he's upright, lives. She has never met him before but decides to stay with him and gets herself a job in a lawyer's office. Lydia then finds herself in a mystery that has already started; the owner of the boarding house, a Miss Penham, vanished a few years back without a trace, except for a letter arriving from America saying she'd runaway with an old flame. Some accept the letter as true, others believe it to be a forgery. It is within this atmosphere that Lydia gets caught up in the suspense and secrecy which seems to involve all boarders in the house, including her father. Which then spreads further afield and Lydia is on the trail of her own family's secrets and mysteries which lead home to her mother and husband.

The story takes so many twists and turns it makes for fascinating reading. What starts out as a missing person case morphs into several different crimes: murder, rape, kidnapping, suicide, impersonation and so on. With WWII only a few years in the future Britain's political scene and the founding of the British Fascist party only adds to the heavy atmosphere that seeps from the pages of this book. With a combination of crimes, characters, secrets, atmosphere and even politics Bleeding Heart Square has just the right amount of "it" to make me love this story. Once you've been shaken up and down along with the plot and everything settles down for the finale, a final screeching reveal hits you which you've actually been wondering about since page one. You see every now and then someone comes along and narrates in the second person, taking to you,the reader, about some diary entries. One wonders who this person is at times, then at others gets used to the voice and forgets to remember to wonder which character is doing this. The amazing conclusion wraps everything up with a satisfying bang and I'll say I was riveted from start to finish. I'll be looking at his other books now, hopefully he has another set in my favourite era of 1850-1950.

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