/ 4 September 2001

Fortunes worth killing for

Eighteenth-century London was tough and unforgiving, the kind of urban nightmare so many cities — Calcutta and Johannesburg, for example — have been allowed to become.

For boxer-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver, that’s all to the good. Where the very rich and the desperately poor live cheek-by-jowl, where cut-purses and prostitutes prey on aristocratic clients with a taste for rough trade, there will be plenty of work tracking down stolen property and, for a fee, returning it to its owner.

Weaver’s business has achieved some success when a new client — overcoming his reluctance for Weaver, who is not only a commoner but a Sephardic Jew — asks him to investigate the death of his father, claiming that both his father and Weaver’s, a stock speculator, were murdered.

David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper is a marvellous book, with the kind of historical detail one would expect from an author currently completing his PhD on “the intersection of the mid-18th century British novel with the contemporaneous emergence of the modern idea of personal finance”.

Large fortunes are made and lost in the coffee houses in Exchange Alley, the precursor of Wall Street, while small fortunes are lost in stinking dives across the river. The difference is in the sophistication of the method by which the unsuspecting are separated from their money. Weaver mostly misses but still manages to land the odd, telling punch as he investigates high finance and low, and fortunes worth killing for.

The setting of Philip Gooden’s Sleep of Death is also London, but more than two centuries earlier, and the action revolves not around Exchange Alley but the Globe Theatre. Aspirant actor Nick Revill is hired by Shakespeare’s company — the Chamberlain’s Men — to fill in for a permanent member gone to tend a sick mother.

He’s one of the few actors who have seen Hamlet, which has been staged perhaps a dozen times; and when he’s befriended by a young man whose mother has married her late husband’s brother only weeks after the death of her elderly first husband, Revill recognises the plot.

At the behest of his new friend, he moves into the friend’s mansion and starts asking questions.

A lightweight book, it’s a brief entertainment, good for a rainy afternoon.