CHARLES FINCH is a graduate of Yale and Oxford. His first novel, A Beautiful Blue Death, was named one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007, one of only five mystery novels on the list. He lives in New York.
The sitting room looked as familiar as the back of his hand, and immediately Lenox took a liking to the young man who inhabited it. He saw several small artifacts of the missing student’s life---a frayed piece of string about two feet long of the sort you might bind a package with, half of a pulpy fried tomato, which was too far from the breakfast table to have been dropped, a fountain pen, and lastly, a card which said on the front The September Society. . . .In the small hours of the morning one fall day in 1866, a frantic widow visits detective Charles Lenox. Lady Annabelle’s problem is simple: her beloved son, George, has vanished from his room at Oxford. When Lenox visits his alma mater to investigate, he discovers a series of bizarre clues, including a murdered cat and a card cryptically referring to the September Society.Then, just as Lenox realizes that the case may be deeper than it appears, a student dies, the victim of foul play.What could the September Society have to do with it? What specter, returned from the past, is haunting gentle Oxford? Lenox, with the support of his devoted friends in London’s upper crust, must race to discover the truth before it comes searching for him, and dangerously close to home.
Questions & Answers
with
Charles Finch
author of
THE SEPTEMBER SOCIETY
Q: Something about Victorian England seems to lend itself to mystery stories, and not just because the genre’s most famous sleuth belonged to that place and time. Was there anything specific that attracted you to London and Oxford of the 1860s?
A: Well, I think the Victorian Era is deeply relatable to our age, and that’s at least partly because of the novelists who were writing then. If you read Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot, they’re not interested in disguised princes flouncing around Regency ballrooms, they’re writing about bankers, housewives, politicians, journalists. It was a commercial era, like ours. But at the same time it was much more dangerous time on the streets of any city, and London especially had a sinister and depraved side to it. As Dr. Watson said, it was the “great cesspool into which all the idlers and loungers of the Empire are drained.” It was only a short walk between Parliament and the gin mills by the river. It’s that combination of the staid and the menacing that I find personally very alluring, and which makes for such great fiction.
Q: You must have done a great deal of research about the era to write your Charles Lenox mysteries. What kind of historical foraging did you do? What interesting things did you discover?
A: A lot of the research I did unconsciously – I’ve been reading and re-reading everything Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers wrote since I was about 12, and Trollope and Dickens from about 16, so I have a strong sense of London as it was in other times. But the research has been fascinating. The Judith Flanders book Life Inside the Victorian Home helped me a lot. I wrote The September Society as I was studying at Oxford, and when I ordered books to my carrel every third one would be about bear baiting or club life along the Pall Mall or the Crystal Palace in 1851, rather than what I was studying – Edmund Spenser and the circle of poets around him!
A: I think Lenox is such a creature of his era, and I’m really proud of that. The Victorian Era was incredibly staid and formal, and yet at the same time it was tremendously, crucially progressive, almost behind the backs of all the country curates and rich brewers who abhorred change. Power hubs were eroding everywhere. Beginning in the 1830’s more and more people could vote, women had more freedom, and the lower classes began to exert political and mercantile pressure on the ruling classes that had long held whip-hand over them. But even as Parliament passed the Reform Acts and repealing the Corn Laws, it would have been absolutely shocking to see a man walking without a hat in Hyde Park. So I think – or I hope – Lenox embodies that strange dichotomy. He would never have deviated for a second from his family’s traditions, or his country’s and class’s, but his heart and mind are nonetheless curious and liberal, in the old sense of that word. And in part that’s why he’s a detective, I guess; it’s his own way of equalizing things. As he says to his protégé in The September Society, being a detective’s not just about solving the posh murders, but all murders.
Q: What has the response been to the character, among reviewers and fans of mysteries?
A: It’s so funny, because the responses have showed me how much more of myself went into my characters than I thought had. For instance several people have said they loved the books, but there was too much coffee and food in them. But I love to write with a tray of coffee and toast – that companionship can help you confront the blank page.
People develop strong affections for the characters, which I should have expected because there are characters, like Dorothea Brooke or Anne Elliot or Sam Weller, whom I think of as just as real as anyone I know. But it’s really moving to me, and humbling, to receive the e-mails I get that treat Lenox as if he were a real person. Or Dr. McConnell, who has been a particular favorite among readers. One woman asked me last week how Lenox’s parents had died, and I realized that once you write a book and send it out into the world, it becomes the readers’ more than yours. Which is a wonderful feeling. I hadn’t thought about Lenox’s parents too much, but that e-mail forced me to.
Advance Praise for The September Society“An intriguing glimpse of student life at Oxford during the mid-Victoria era with a sleuth to rival Sherlock Holmes, only with more foibles and warmth than the original.” ---Rhys Bowen, author of Tell Me, Pretty Maiden“Reminiscent of Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George . . . one hopes to see more of Lenox and Lady Jane.” ---Booklist Praise for A Beautiful Blue Death“Vividly capturing the essence of Victorian England, Finch presents us with a unique sleuth who combines the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes with the people skills of Thomas Pitt. A sparkling achievement.” ---Library Journal (starred review)“A fine specimen of the genre . . . Particularly good is [Finch’s] delineation of Lenox’s cozy but proper relationship with Lady Jane.” ---Washington Post“The best sort of historical mystery---clever, charming, full of period detail, and a delight to read.” ---David Liss, author of The Whiskey Rebels
Found in: Historical
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