BY GASLIGHT: Thumbs Up? Thumbs Down?
Fiction
Crime is how this city works BY GASLIGHT
By Steven Price
731 pp. Picador
Reviewed by Sue Ellis By Gaslight is a masterpiece of fiction that imagines an event in the life of American detective Allen Pinkerton. When his father (the famous William Pinkerton) dies, Allen feels duty-bound to hunt down a man his father had been unsuccessful in finding. Young Edward Shade had been taken under the wing of the elder Pinkerton during the Civil War and trained as an operative under his command. Shade disappeared while on assignment. Using his father’s file on the subject, Allen leaves Chicago bound for London to contact agents employed by his abolitionist father some twenty years earlier, a former slave couple he’d helped to freedom. Their assignment: follow a London lead to Edward Shade. The setting is beautifully surreal, 1800’s London at her sooty and melancholy best. The story is partly told from Allen Pinkerton’s straightforward account, run-on sentences as impatient as his...