Mystery Monday: The Face of a Stranger!

Our book today is Anne Perry’s 1990 Victorian mystery, The Face of a Stranger, which introduced her detective William Monk to the thousands of her readers who’d previously enjoyed her ten novels set a generation later in Victorian times and starring Thomas Pitt – novels she’d been writing with clockwork regularity for ten years before William Monk arrived on the scene. The Thomas Pitt novels have no animating force at all – they are almost entirely simple scenery in motion – and whether or not she herself sensed that fact, Perry took a crucial step to correct it in the first William Monk novel: she gave the book a very nifty hook.

The hook is simplicity itself: when we first meet Monk, he’s awakening in a grimy, crowded hospital, badly wounded and with no memory of how he got there – or who he himself was. Attendants tell him his name is William Monk and that a police inspector has been calling regularly to inquire after his health. Monk hungrily grabs at every stray detail of his forgotten life that comes his way, eventually making his way to his old apartment, where he finally sees his own face in a mirror:

The face he saw was dark and very strong, broad, slightly aquiline nose, wide mouth, rather thin upper lip, lower lip fuller, with an old scar just below it, eyes intense luminous gray in the flickering light. It was a powerful face, but not an easy one. If there was humor it would be harsh, of wit rather than laughter. He could have been anything between thirty-five and forty-six.

He picked up the lamp and walked back to the main room, finding the way blindly, his inner eye still seeing the face that had stared back at him from the dim glass. It was not that it displeased him especially, but it was the face of a stranger, and not one easy to know.

He goes to his own precinct house and meets again with Inspector Runcorn of the Metropolitan Police Force, who, perhaps over-estimating the speed of his recovery, immediately assigns him a case, the murder of Joscelin Grey, younger brother of Lord Shelburne. He’s given the assistance of a junior officer named John Evan, and the plot moves forward along two parallel paths from that point, with the main and far less interesting strand being the murder case and the secondary and far more fascinating strand of Monk increasingly learning about his pre-accident self. Of course this isn’t at all how amnesia works, but Perry surely knew that herself before she wrote a word – and it doesn’t really matter, since there’s no denying its dramatic effectiveness. At every point in the story, we get telling reminders that Monk isn’t happy with the man he’s realizing he is:

He felt failure begin to circle around him, dark and enclosing. Had Runcorn given him [the case] knowing he would fail? Was it a discreet and efficient way of getting rid of him without being seen to be callous? How did he even know for sure that Runcorn was not an old enemy? Had he done him some wrong long ago? The possibility was cold and real. The shadowy outline of himself that had appeared so far was devoid of any quick acts of compassion, any sudden gentleness or warmth to seize hold of and to like. He was discovering himself as a stranger might, and what he saw so far did not excite his admiration.

It’s in this first book that Monk meets former Crimea nurse and feisty social activist Hester Latterly, and it’s easy to tell from their rather anachronistic sexual chemistry that the two will be having many adventures together. Those adventures have stretched on for nearly twenty books since The Face of a Stranger, and although Perry’s realization of period detail is already consummate by 1990, her skills at plotting improve at only a glacial pace. On one level – maybe a very important level – these are all quite boring books. Their actual mystery-plots are usually childishly easy to anticipate, and the working-class Londoner argot gets very tiresome very quickly. The point of these novels is the embattled identity of William Monk; that aspect never ceases to be fascinating, and that story starts with this grim and interesting book.