Dickens with a more audacious plot, The Trail of the Serpent may be, as Chris Willis argues (in an excellent short essay printed at the end of the work), the first British detective novel. Certainly it has an engagingly intelligent detective in Mr Peters, who is unable to speak, so telegraphs his lifesaving suggestion to an innocent man in the dock by means of sign language. Peters’s remarkably fortuitous identification of a ruthless killer is fortunate since the villain is so very evil, talented and lucky. Jabez North succeeds in removing himself from his workhouse origins by appearing to be the perfect Victorian not quite gentleman. Virtue, however, takes him only so far. He rises to the heights of French aristocracy by means of murder of an inconvenient child, of a wealthy merchant and apparently by tricking an heiress into despatching her first husband. The mystery here is not so much ‘whodunnit’ but how he can be stopped. Not apparently by the dissolute but good hearted Richard Marwood, who is imprisoned in a lunatic asylum for one of Jabez’s murders. Yet the tide turns when the reader is introduced to his band of rollicking friends ready to join forces with Peters. Jabez has also been careless in fathering a child, who, like himself, is rescued from the river Slosh as an abandoned baby. Taken in by Peters, he is brought up to be a genius detective and while still a small child is terrifyingly brilliant in seeking out his evil parent.
Maybe the young ‘Sloshy’ grows up to be Sherlock Holmes. For The Trail of the
Serpent is the antecedent of both that great detective and of an even more challenging
late Victorian horror, Count Dracula himself. Like Dracula, Jabez has a penchant
for travelling in coffins when pushed, and also cheats death if only metaphorically.
I would recommend the novel for the energy, ingenuity and sheer startling nature
of its plots and overwrought characters. Don’t pick it up expecting realism.
As in the best melodrama, events are shaped by an emotional and moral logic
not a probable one. The Trail of the Serpent is fun, and a reminder of the
mythical and folkloric heritage of crime fiction. Sarah Waters’ introduction
is a vivid and helpful way into this other world. In Chris Willis, the novel
has found its ideal editor: the endnotes themselves are a fascinating window
onto a mid Victorian landscape.
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Susan Rowland