10 July 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-83598-087-3
It is July 1772, and Bristol, in the west of England, is a prosperous trading and business centre. Isaiah Ollenu is a clerk to the barrister Jacob Dunne, and he is working towards one day becoming a barrister himself. Ollenu is highly intelligent, lively, imaginative and diligent, but he is also Black. Although Ollenu is freeborn, and legislation has recently been passed to abolish slavery in Great Britain, it is still the accepted practice in much of the world, including in British colonies, and there is deep-rooted prejudice against Black people, however well-educated and respectable. Ollenu has great respect for Dunne, and is very grateful to him, so when Dunne asks him to go on a mission for him and Dunne’s client, Edward Barrow, Ollenu does not feel that he can refuse. Barrow owns an insurance company and claims that three of his clients have deliberately disappeared so that their families can fraudulently have them declared them dead and claim their insurance money. Dunne and Barrow want Ollenu to accompany Barrow’s insurance agent to Jamaica in search of the missing people.
Ollenu is horrified at the thought of visiting an island where slavery is still an accepted way of life and is desolate at the thought of leaving his pregnant wife and their two children, but he succumbs to the pressure upon him and agrees.
When Ollenu and Ruben Ashby, the insurance agent, meet as they board the passenger ship the Isabella, it is clear that the partnership between the two men is destined to be far from cordial. Ashby is older than Ollenu, pious, stingy, and instinctively unwilling to believe evil of respectable white people. Ollenu finds the journey a nightmare, he is aware of the hostility of his fellow passengers and the crew of the Isabella and is unsettled when he realises that a ship called Isabella had been involved in the slave trade, despite Ashby’s assurances that this had been a different ship and the name is just a coincidence.
In Jamaica things do not improve for Ollenu, because the majority of white people assume that he is Ashby’s property, and he is disgusted by the cruelty with which many of the slave owners treat their slaves. What is more, he soon distrusts many of the officials that they had been assured would assist them, and he increasingly believes that there is deceit festering beneath the surface civility. At an official evening event, Ollenu and Ashby encounter Doctor Lewis Hutchinson, a man with a vile reputation, who nevertheless is accepted into polite society, despite rumours that he is a violent man and probably a killer. As they continue to search for the three people they are employed to find, Ollenu and Ashby find themselves trapped at Hutchinson’s remote house, grandiloquently called Edinburgh Castle, and realise that they are at the mercy of a mad and ruthless murderer, who has already killed numerous people.
The Case of the Mad Doctor is the first book to feature Isaiah Ollenu and Ruben Ashby,
but I very much hope that it is not the last. The book is not a straightforward
mystery, because both the title and back cover information makes clear the
identity of the major villain, although Hutchinson is not the only evil person
portrayed in the story. The character of Doctor Hutchinson is based on a real-life
serial killer, who was active in Jamaica in the eighteenth century; however the
plot and the majority of the characters are fictional, including Ollenu and
Ashby. All of the characters are well drawn, and Isaiah Ollenu is an engaging
protagonist, courageous, generous and determined to help those who have nobody
to fight for them. One of the strong, underlying themes of the book is trust,
and the instinct to accept as right behaviour that which is the accepted norm.
The historical details are vivid and convincing and describe the horror and
injustice of the slave trade without preaching or pretension. This is an
excellent, thought-provoking read, which I thoroughly recommend.
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Reviewer: Carol Westron
