Having read The Interesting Adventures of Olaudah Equiano and A Portable Paradise, I seemed to have something of a slavery theme in my reading (as unintentional as it was) so I decided to continue it with Blood and Sugar, a murder mystery set around the slave traders of Deptford.
At first, I found the book a little pulpy, the sort of book where shadows are described as passing over someone’s soul. This feeling was further increased when the main character walked into a room, the narrator described a several paragraph itinerary of what was in it than told the reader, “I noted all these facts peripherally”. As the book went on, the pulpy elements seemed less glaring as I got into the voice of the book, then they became a feature I enjoyed about it.
Captain Harry Corsham is essentially a noir-ish gumshoe detective and this is a noir-ish gumshoe book, complete with a fun, slightly cheesy, first-person voice. It’s paced brilliantly, with a shocking act or piece of information coming along regularly and a small cliffhanger at the end of all of the short chapters. I can see why C.J Tudor said she read it in a day.
There’s a shocking murder at the beginning, a body is found which has been branded, tortured with thumbscrews, whipped and then had their throat slit. The visceral nature of the murder grabs the attention, like the more twisted murders in Seven or that Messiah series. However, these are all revealed to be typical slave punishments and the sadistic aspects of the killing are everyday actions to the slavers, and a perpetual fear for the slaves.
The casualness of cruelty that the slavers adopt and the impact of that cruelty on their own souls is one of the themes of the book. Corsham wanders about Deptford and finds an ironmonger shop which sells thumbscrews, scold’s bridles and chains “every size, from four years old”. People off-handedly talk about how they had to crucify someone to pacify others, and the central mystery which surrounds a Zong-like ship.
One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the depiction of Deptford, as somewhere that is specifically distinct from London. They have their own accents, their own rules and their own systems of control. The ownership of slaves within England itself was a very muddy one, and the people of Deptford own outright slaves where that wouldn’t be possible within London itself.
There’s also a lot about the precariousness of being a freed slave. Equiano found himself constantly cheated and was several times almost kidnapped back into slavery, but this was always when he was in the West Indies. It could be that he was writing for a London audience that meant he didn’t talk about similar problems in England itself, but the freed slaves in this novel are almost as imprisoned as the slaves themselves. Two work as painters and abolitionists but are easy prey for anyone who wishes to attack them, another runs a criminal gang which protects freed slaves, and another works for a slave-trader he despises.
There’s also a lot about how slavery was considered one of the nation’s backbones and that the urge to protect the institution went into the upper classes and the government. Captain Corsham has to do a lot of sneaking around his ‘own people’ so he won’t be caught undermining their interests.
While this book does paint a graphic picture of slavery, the harm it did to all participants of it and how entrenched it was within the country, it still manages to be a decent noir-ish thriller, keeping the pace up throughout. I found the solution of the murderer to be quite dissatisfying, and I can see why the killer was who they were from a story structure sense, I felt it detracted from the book in a thematic one.
I’m not sure I’ll read Daughters of the Night, which appears to be Corsham’s wife delving into the underbelly of prostitution to solve her own murder, but only because I feel like it’d be more of the same. I can’t decide whether using the backdrop of slavery for a mystery novel feels appropriate or not, the reality of the slave trade seems like one of those dark events, like the holocaust, that doesn’t easily fit with a very constructed genre piece. The carefully constructed, and pulpy elements of the book did sometimes clash with the genuine horror of history.
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