Book #8: Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

Another library audiobook for the win! I totally enjoyed this one. Somehow it's been on my "to-read" list on Goodreads for almost 3 years but I've never gotten around to it! The thing that made me feel interested in this book is that it incorporates a real-life Victorian-era British writer, who I learned about in an English class at BYU and who I actually had to spend a lot of time reading. Thomas de Quincey was most famous for his "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," which was just as sensational at the time as it sounds ("Confessions" of anything is such a modern-sounding topic, right?), but he wrote a lot of highly personal essays which we read in my Personal Essays class at BYU--and I had to write based off of his style for a project so I felt connected to him. He was a pretty minor character in the vast field of English literature so it was funny to read the synopsis of this book and see him included as a major character--actually as one of the people helping to solve the mystery of some murders committed in London and which were attempted to be pinned on him through his many writings. I really liked the interesting twist on history, the sort of "what if" scenario that Morrell created: what if a madman used De Quincey's writings to recreate a murder and then try to pin it on him? It seems like a very modern possibility--people using writers' or others' oversharing to do sinister things to them. I liked that aspect of the book. I also liked the look into the Victorian era that Morrell provided. He slipped a lot of interesting facts in, like the fact that investigating a crime scene had just become standard protocol in the mid-1800s, and about the fogs that were always covering London, and the different levels of distinction between the medical classes, like doctors vs. surgeons. It didn't feel forced though, and I felt like I got a good sense about the time period through those ideas.

This was a great one to listen to, and I kind of want to check out the following books (apparently this is the beginning of a series with Thomas de Quincey and his daughter as crime-solvers). However, I have such a long list that who knows when that will ever happen!