For whatever reason, St. Andrews had cast Goddard as the villain in the solipsistic drama that was his life. For reasons of his own, Goddard reveled in that fact. That my own nemesis had ended up sharing rooms with Goddard’s could only have been some sort of divine joke. [loc. 199]
London, 1889: Ira Adler, former rent-boy, lives a life of luxury in the elegant townhouse of crime lord Dr Cain Goddard. Ira's background makes him the ideal person to retrieve a porcelain figure of a dog, in which are concealed secrets that could bring down Goddard -- and his nemesis, the detective Andrew St Andrews, with whom Ira's former lover Dr Timothy Lazarus shares rooms. Unfortunately, Ira is not all that competent: he doesn't notice until he gets home, a four-mile walk, that the dog has been stolen from him. (Later, he will manage to lock himself out of the house, half-dressed, while having a cigarette.) As Ira and Lazarus pursue the porcelain dog, they discover the dark secrets underpinning Goddard's crime empire, and Ira begins to wonder if the cruel comments by Goddard's butler Collins might, after all, be true: is he just another disposable ornament?
I didn't especially warm to Ira, though I admired his loyalty to his friend Nick and his fortitude in rescuing those who could not rescue themselves: and I liked the way that he developed a conscience, and made moral choices. I did like Dr Lazarus, who runs a clinic in the roughest part of Whitechapel, and whose 'particular friend' St Andrews is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Dr Lazarus's story -- very much the derring-do boys' own adventure of popular fiction at the time -- could easily have been the focus of the novel: but I think Ira's story is more interesting, because less cut-and-dried.
Kudos to the author for foregrounding just how unpleasant leaping into the nineteenth-century Thames would have been! In light of that, I'll forgive the occasional Americanism such as 'sidewalk'.
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