The Victorian era gothic crime fiction novel Things in Jars by Jess Kidd is a great read. Set in London, the atmosphere is vivid, there’s plenty of magical realism, and Kidd’s grasp of creative language is enviable as well as witty. 

London is awash with the freshly murdered. Bodies appear hourly, blooming in doorways with their throats cut, prone in alleyways with the head knocked in. Half-burnt in hearths and garroted in garrets, folded into trunks or bobbing about in the Thames, great bloated shoals of them.

Bridie Devine, former surgeons apprentice, is a pipe smoking detective. She has a dagger strapped to her thigh and sometimes cross dresses to gain access into male only spaces. She also sees things, ghosts mainly. She chats to them, in particular a recently deceased boxer called Ruby Doyle who has the hots for her. She is not interested, but still he stays as her protector.

The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.

Bridie takes on a case to find Sir Edmund Berwick’s missing child called Christabel. For some reason Sir Edmond has kept the child in hiding her whole life. It turns out Charitable is no ordinary child.

Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.

Things in Jars is a dark, strange, whimsical, and compelling novel. I’ll be reading more of Jess Kidd’s work – I’m hooked.