‘The Waxwork Man’ by J. C. Briggs

Published by The Sapre Books,
16 September 2023.  
ISBN: 978-0-85495089-8 (PB)

The Waxwork Man is the eleventh novel in J. C. Briggs’s series involving Charles Dickens and Victorian London. Having enjoyed its immediate predecessor The Jaggard Case (which I reviewed last October), it has been no hardship at all to plunge back into a world of villains, fogs and entertaining characters, some of whom redeem one’s faith in humanity.

The novel starts in a fairly gruesome way. Dickens is visiting Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors where he bumps into Sir Fabian Quarterman, a judge with a ruthless reputation who seems to take particular pleasure in despatching women to prison or worse. The disagreeable Sir Fabian persuades the reluctant Dickens to go back to his mansion with the promise that he has a collection of waxworks better than that of Madame Tussaud’s. The novelist is extremely discomfited to discover that all the exhibits are effigies of women who have been sentenced to death or who have died in other brutal ways. The following day Sir Fabian is found dead in his gallery, a grimace of terror on his face, and is initially assumed to have expired through apoplexy, but when Dickens examines the gallery with Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street, he is sure one of the waxwork women is missing. Has Quarterman been frightened to death?

Dolls then start appearing everywhere it seems, including shop windows and graveyards. Dickens and his fellow investigators (a rich seam of characters, mostly policemen, but also including Dickens’s endearing young friend Scrap) start looking for various people. Sir Fabian’s much younger estranged wife Eliza is one of these, and indeed there is a plethora of Elizas or other women whose names start with E (Emma Cooper is also a missing person at one point). There also appears to be various mysterious women dressed in black who Dickens follows, sometimes unsuccessfully. Believe it or not, glass eyes become an increasingly important feature of the plot.

Blackmail soon rears its ugly head, and the police and Dickens start to be taunted by the criminal. For quite a time we know who this villain is, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with finding him. This becomes an even more pressing matter when it is discovered that another person, determined to settle a serious grudge, is also after him. The climax, like the beginning, is pretty gruesome but, one feels, the characters involved get their comeuppance.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable and well-written novel which again recreates the atmosphere of Dickensian London. I particularly relished one or two asides, such as when Ma Dunk, a laundress, ‘had run out of steam’, and when it is said of a literary magazine ‘They’d hardly be publishing The Waxwork Man – if it existed.’ Don’t worry if you haven’t read any of its predecessors, as the story stands on its own and the author includes a comprehensive list of characters at the start. As with previous volumes there are illuminating Historical Notes and A Note to the Reader at the end which put many things into context.
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Reviewer: David Whittle 

Jean Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong, and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage by a river in Cumbria with a view of the Howgill Fells and a lot of sheep, though it is the streets of Victorian London that are mostly in her mind when she is writing about Charles Dickens as a detective. There are eleven novels in the series so far, published by Sapere Books. The latest, The Jaggard Case, came out in October 2022. Number eleven, The Waxwork Man, comes out on September 15^th. Another novel will come out at the end of 2023. This is a new departure, a novel about an empty house called Foulstone in the old county of Westmorland, a house with secrets kept since the First World War. She was Vice Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (2018-2022), is still a board member of the CWA, a member of Historical Writers’ Association, the Dickens Fellowship, The Society of Authors, and a trustee of Sedbergh Book Town. 

jcbriggsbooks.com

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then. He is currently convenor of the East Midlands Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.