Farrier's Lane, by Anne Perry

 

The Book 

Trigger Warning

    When Inspector Thomas Pitt takes up his mother-in-law's invitation to go to the opera with her, he agrees and he and Charlotte are treated to one of the smaller operatic comedies in London at that time. While they are enjoying the show, Pitt notices that one of the other patrons in the audience has taken severely ill. He goes to help. He finds to his dismay, that the man is gravely ill, and probably dying. He returns to the box to get Charlotte and have her go sit with the man's wife. 

    As the man lays on the floor dying of a suspected opiate overdose, Pitt learns that he is Judge Sutton, a low level court of appeals judge, who earlier that day was looking to see if a guilty verdict was wrongly rendered in an appalling case five years earlier. 

    Because of the political sensitivities surrounding Sutton's death, Pitt has to look into who would have wanted to murder a judge. Was is just a tragic, domestic affair where his wife had him killed so she could eventually marry her lover, or was there really a miscarriage of justice in the Farrier Lane case of five years ago? Was the accused man only accused because the death was an outrageous crucifixion and he was the most convenient Jew in the case? It bothers Pitt that such prejudices and pressures could have sent an innocent man to the gallows. 

    While Pitt is now investigating both murders, Charlotte at the behest of her mother Caroline, is now trying to be of some help, if she can. She knows she has to be careful, because the murderer, if there is only one, has killed twice to protect his secrets and will not hesitate to do so again. 

My Thoughts

    Anne Perry has delved into the anti-Semitism of the Victorian psyche in this novel. The crime is gruesome, with religious overtones. Perry paints her portrait of her hero, Thomas Pitt, as a man whose foibles are mostly irrelevant. He is our knight errant in these books. He hold remarkably modern ideas, the ones we expressed not that long ago. This book is an example of what the post WWII generation thought was important in the discussion about anti-Semitism, what they felt were the trinational causes of it, and why at the end of the day those thoughts were wrong. It is a story about how horribly hate twists the insides of a person, and causes them to set aside every moral principle in order to fulfill their own hate. 

    It makes this a sad, and more interesting reading this time around. I grew up in this world, where in my youth it seemed we would actually, through education, compassion, and sheer force of will defeat such troubling things as racism and bigotry. I admit this view was a bit naïve, ignoring the vast, irrefutable evidence, even as recently as my grandparents' lifetime that such hatred could, would, and did warp the world in catastrophic ways. But it felt like, with the advent of the nuclear bomb, we had finally come together as a planet, just enough, to realize we have one home, and we all live here. Let us. please God (as Anne Perry says unironically in her books), show compassion and understanding so we all might be just a little bit better off. That world now seems very far away. I miss it, or maybe I miss me.

    These overarching principles of morality are the themes of Anne Perry's books. She doesn't preach, she takes a story and lets it unfold. Most of her victims are, like in Agatha Christie's work, doing something wrong. This is the start of the their journey. The provocation for their murders. But if the murders are provoked, bit by bit the story, the justification comes unraveled and we see that justifications may be logical, but they are never right. It's an explanation, not an excuse. Nothing really ever excuses murder. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

    This book entered my library on April 6, 2018. It is one of the Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks as have been most of the books by Anne Perry in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Books I have read to date. At the time of purchase is cost $17.00 and there were no markings in this 374 page book. It does feel from examining these books that the length of books is going up as time goes on. This book is very near the 400 pages that a Michael Connelly typically is. I would surmise from this experience that the average length of a book for a popular author rose from 60,000 to 75,000 words (240-300 pages) to between 85,000 words and 100,000 words (340-400 pages). I would attribute this rise to 1) increased payouts to successful authors and a noticeable trend that avid readers liked longer books, therefore, publishers asked authors for longer books. And 2) it was possible for everyone to meet these longer demands because of the rise in personal computing between the end of the 1980s and the middle of the 1990s. But that's just a theory on my part, I haven't done any real research into it. 

This Book                               $17.00 

This Summer                        $717.83