Great Stink

William May returns to London after the horrors of the Crimean War. Scarred and fragile though he is, he lands a job at the heart of Bazalgette's transformation of the London sewers. There, in the darkness of the stinking tunnels beneath the rising towers of Victorian London, May discovers another side of the city and remembers a disturbing, violent past. And then the corruption of the growing city soon begins to overwhelm him and a violent murder is committed. Will the sewers reveal all and show that the world above ground is even darker and more threatening than the tunnels beneath? Beautifully written, evocative and compelling, with a fantastically vivid cast of characters, Clare Clarke's book is a rich and suspenseful novel that draws the reader right into Victorian London and into the worlds of its characters desperately attempting to swim the tides of change. Where the channel snaked to the right it was no longer possible to stand upright, despite the abrupt drop in the gradient. The crown of William's hat grazed the slimed roof as he stooped, holding his lantern before him, and the stink of excrement pressed into his nostrils. His hand was unsteady and the light shuddered and jumped in the darkness. Rising and rushing through the narrower gully, the stream pressed the greased leather of his high boots hard against the flesh of his calves, the surge of the water muffling the clatter of hooves and iron-edged wheels above him. Of course he was deeper now. Between him and the granite-block road was at least twenty feet of heavy London clay. The weight of it deepened the darkness. Beneath his feet the rotten bricks were treacherous, soft as crumbled cheese, and with each step the thick layer of black sludge sucked at the soles of his boots. Although his skin bristled with urgency, William forced himself to walk slowly and deliberately the way the flushers had shown him, pressing his heel down hard into the uncertain ground before unrolling his weight forward on to the ball of his foot, scanning the surface of the water for rising bubbles. The sludge hid pockets of gas, slop gas the flushers called it, the faintest whiff of which they claimed could cause a man to drop unconscious, sudden as if he'd been shot. From the little he knew of the toxic effects of sulphuretted hydrogen, William had every reason to believe them. The pale light of his lantern sheered off the black crust of the water and threw a villain's shadow up the curved wall. Otherwise there was no relief from the absolute darkness, not even in the first part of the tunnel where open gratings led directly up into the street. All day the fog had crouched low over London, a chocolate-coloured murk that reeked of sulphur and defied the certainty of dawn. In vain the gas-lamps pressed their circles of light into its upholstered interior. Carriages loomed out of the darkness, the stifled skitters and whinnies of horses blurring with the warning shouts of coachmen. Pedestrians, their faces obscured by hats and collars, slipped into proximity and as quickly out again. On the river the hulking outlines of the penny steamers resembled a charcoal scrawl over which a child had carelessly drawn a sleeve. Now, at nearly six o'clock in the evening, the muddy brown of afternoon had been smothered into night. William was careful to close the shutter of his lantern off beneath the open gratings, as furtive as a sewer-hunter. It was bad enough that he was alone, without a look-out at ground level, in direct contravention of the Board's directives. It would be even harder to explain his presence here, in a section of the channel recently declared unsafe and closed off until extensive repair work could be undertaken. William could hardly protest to be innocent of the decision. He had written the report requiring it himself, his first official report to the Board: Within the southern section of the King-street branch deterioration to interior brickwork is severe, with the shoulder of the arch particularly suffering from extensive decomposition. While tidal scour can be relied upon to prevent undue accumulation of deposits, the high volumes of floodwater sustained within the tunnel during periods of full tide and heavy rainfall pose a grave threat to the stability of the interior structure. Underpinning of the crown is urgently required to prevent subsidence. DANGER. The precision of the words had satisfied him. Within them was contained the evidence of a world where method and reason strapped down chaos. On their very first day as assistants to the Commission the group of young men had been taken to meet Mr Bazalgette himself. One of their number, eager to ingratiate himself with the master, had begged him to disclose what he considered the characteristics of a successful engineer. Bazalgette had paused, his fingers against his lips. When he spoke it was quietly, almost to himself. The great engineer, he said, was a pragmatist made conservative by the conspicuous failures of structures and machines hastily contrived. He was regular in his habits, steady, disciplined, methodical in his problem-solving. He was equable and law-abiding. Carelessness, self-indulgence, untidiness and fits of temper were foreign to him. From the turmoil of his natural instincts he brought order. 'How unutterably tedious he'd like us!' one of the pupils had hissed at William as they were dismissed. William paid no attention. In the months that followed he had held on to Bazalgette's words, repeating them to himself until their shape acquired the metre of a magic charm. William no longer trusted in prayer. Where the floor of the tunnel levelled out once more William paused, holding his lantern up to the wall. The water tugged impatiently at his boots. Where the light caught it, the masonry bulged with overlapping wads of fungi. They sprouted fatly from between the spongy bricks, their fleshy undersides bloated and blind, quilting the holes that pocked the walls. They were the closest that the tunnels came to plant life but William could find no affection for them. He ducked further, pulling in his shoulders to avoid brushing against their pallid flesh. Their cold yeasty smell rose above the privy stench of the filthy water. William's throat closed. For a moment he felt the tilt of the ship and his hair crawled, alive with vermin. Men moaned all around him, crying out for help that never came. He had a sudden urge to dash the glass of the lantern against the wall. A shard of the broken glass would be as sharp as a knife. It would slice through the stinking fungi until their flesh fell away from the wall. Would it bleed or would it simply yield the yellowed ooze of a corpse too long in the sun? The craving quickened within him and his breath came in shallow dips. He imagined his fingers closing round a dagger of glass, tight and then tighter until his blood ran in narrow black streams between his knuckles. The hunger pressed into his throat, and crowded his chest. He stared into the lantern, watching the worm of flame curl as he swung it slowly backwards and forwards. Just one hard blow. That was all it would take. He pulled back his arm . . . AN ACCIDENTAL MURDER I never set out to write a crime novel. Though I had long been an admirer of the genre, particularly of those authors like P D James or Ruth Rendell who always contrived to combine clever and labyrinthine plots with prose as crisp and elegant as any literary novel, it was the idea of writing a historical novel that first attracted me. I had studied history at university and, even then, as a teenager more interested in parties than academic achievement, had found myself unexpectedly beguiled by the worlds that my essays took me into. All the same, when I began The Great Stink I had no idea just how passionate I would become about mid-Victorian London, a time of unshakeable faith in progress when building was at its frenzied apogee and the city was the largest of its kind on earth. I was born and brought up in London and, like a lot of Londoners, I expect, my knowledge of the city centred upon an encyclopaedic knowledge of its shops and restaurants, and a pretty good grasp of which bus route got you where and the places you didn’t want to find yourself stranded late at night. It was only when I returned to London in 2001, having lived in New York City for almost four years, that I realised how little I knew about London’s history, the stories behind its familiar streets, the reasons why this dirty sprawling beautiful unruly profusion of a city had come to be the way it was. Our new house was in Wandsworth, an area of London I knew hardly at all. I discovered that, until the nineteenth century, the area south of the Thames was a swamp, the areas closest to the river a poor and disreputable district of stinking factories and yards, the remainder relatively unknown to other Londoners except as a source of disquiet. All of this changed in the mid-nineteenth century when the railways were built and the proliferation of branch lines to these outlying areas connected them for the first time to the very centre of the city. Suddenly suburban retreats came within the range of the new commuters, previously unable to live at such a distance from their place of work and city dwellers poured in. Fields filled up with streets of villas, designed for the middling kind of family. Our particular street, a mishmash of every imaginable kind of architecture, was, I discovered, built as a showcase for the local architects and builders, for it lay upon the route to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace and might therefore be seen by many thousands of potential customers. And so it was that I was inspired to begin my research into a novel about the building of London’s railways. I intended the story to turn upon the twin tales of two men: one, an engineer building the railway, the second, a poor man and his family displaced by the mass demolition of tenement housing that was a necessary prerequisite for the railways’ progress. But the more I read about the railways, the more distracted I became by quite another monumental construction. In 1860 the price of bricks in London doubled. In large part this was due to the building of structures such as bridges and stations required by the railway system, and the cheap back-to-back housing thrown up to accommodate those whom the railways had displaced. But mostly it was because, beneath the pavements of London, another perhaps even more audacious building project was progressing. An entire network of sewers was under construction, over eighty miles of tunnel that, thanks to the ingenious designs of Joseph Bazalgette, would transform London’s drainage system into one of the engineering wonders of the world. The sewers provided the most irresistible location for a historical novel. They were shadowy, hidden, putrid, a literal underworld beneath the teeming city streets, and as such lent themselves perfectly to a story of secrets and concealments. I saw them as a place outside of the rigid rules of Victorian society, a place of lawlessness, yes, but also a place that offered sanctuary, even freedom. My railway engineer transmuted into a surveyor, William May, one of the breed of clever working men for whom the boom in civil engineering had provided an opportunity for advancement that their own fathers might only have dreamed of; my displaced man became Long Arm Tom, a ‘tosher’ or scavenger who scraped a living from selling whatever he could salvage from the underground drains and tunnels and for whom the development of a new sewer system was to prove catastrophic. The Great Stink sets their two stories in parallel, exploring how their lives, which in any other context would never have touched, come, in the sewers, to impact upon one another to lasting and profound effect. It was these two men, then, that led me inexorably to the climax at the centre of the novel, a grisly murder. Sarah Burton, author of Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, wrote a fascinating article recently in which she identified perhaps the greatest strength of historical novels as the ability to place characters in situations unfamiliar or impossible to us today, and thereby to explore not only the minutiae of lives like ours led in very different times and circumstances but also the capacities and limitations of the human spirit under a spectrum of pressures quite alien to our own times. In this way she likened historical fiction to science fiction, since both set out to create a world sufficiently familiar for readers to be able to identify with it and sufficiently alien for them to be able to look at it with fresh eyes. This summarises perfectly what I drew me to the world of The Great Stink. By immersing myself (sometimes literally, thanks to the kind support of Thames Water!) in Victorian London I slowly began to know, and then to feel, the mores of the time and how they contrived to constrain or to liberate those that inhabited them. The primary character in The Great Stink, the engineer William May, is a veteran of the Crimean War. The war was from the outset a conflict of appalling losses, both to disease and to a series of chaotically mismanaged encounters with the enemy. The battle of Inkerman, in which May sustains his wounds, was a ramshackle affair fought with bayonets at close quarters. Such conflicts clearly inflicted terrible psychological damage upon the young men who fought there. One nurse mentioned in her journal that many junior soldiers ‘became imbecile and it was believed that this affliction was often caused by fright’. Many more were invalided home with the loose diagnosis of ‘low fever’, Victorian code for depression. And yet, unlike today, there was no aftercare for such men, no counselling or support groups. On the contrary, Victorian society was circumscribed by repressive certainties and rigid definitions of what it meant to be a respectable Christian and gentleman. There was no allowance for weakness in so rigidly paternalistic a society. May was sent home and expected to pick up his life exactly where he left it, his devastating flashbacks and concomitant panic attacks a guilty and hidden secret. The self-harm to which May resorts to deal with these attacks, inflicted on himself in what he comes to regard as the sanctuary of the sewers, becomes therefore not a cause of sympathy, as it might be today, but a source of terrible shame, a subject he is unable to broach even with his loving wife. Far from being documented, and perhaps even prevented, his unmediated fits of madness lead to a tangle of events that spiral out of his control. This makes him particularly vulnerable for, in a society where respectability was paramount, the opportunities for blackmail were rife. And in a world where human frailty was to be hidden at all costs, it was hardly surprising that May might lose sight of who he had become and no longer trust in his own innocence. Which brings us to the murder. Again the historical context of the novel provided possibilities for the story not open to a contemporary crime writer. In the nineteenth century investigative policing was a new and underdeveloped area. The movement of characters could not be tracked and proven by CCTV footage; science had barely grasped the principles of the cataloguing of fingerprints, let alone the forensic examination of DNA. The confusion brought about by dual identities and impostors was credible, even probable, in a social structure so regimented that social classes seldom mixed and appearance was considered a reliable indicator of identity. Murders were therefore much harder to solve and, unless witnessed, often impossible to prove. This murkiness, as much a part of The Great Stink as the shadowy underworld of the sewers, added a vital element to the mystery surrounding the murder that takes place there. The historical setting allowed for other critical plot developments, impossible in a modern context. Illiteracy was common, allowing for misunderstandings that could never occur in a twenty-first century city. Long-Arm Tom, the tosher whose story makes up the other half of The Great Stink, has no idea of the meaning or value of the documents in his possession and no access to a literate person he can trust. Similarly, when May’s lawyer seeks him out and asks for his help, his instinct is for mistrust and suspicion, a perfectly reasonable impulse in a society where industry was revered and the yoke of poverty and privation considered not so much a misfortune as a crime. In retrospect I am glad I did not set out to write a historical murder-mystery. Quite aside from the burdens that I would have doubtless found imposed upon me by identifying so specific a genre, my story grew not from an imagined plot but from the characters and, equally as importantly, from the period in which they lived. I spent three months researching Victorian London before I attempted to define the story of these men, and it was their situations, and the pressures placed upon them by the place they occupied in history, that drove the action forward and made the murder that takes place in The Great Stink inevitable.