Volume 41, No. 1, Spring 2025
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES
- The Lost Rivers of London by Aubrey Nye Hamilton
- London Mysteries and the First Armchair Detective by Ashley Bowden
- Charlie Chan in London: Beyond Earl Derr Biggers by Rush Glick
- R. Austin Freeman’s London- Based Detective, Dr. John Thorndyke by Andrew McAleer
- Mysterious London Walks by Linda Triegel
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
- A Sherlock Holmes Pastiche? How Hard Could That Be? by J. F. Benedetto
- London Via Pepys by Ellis Blackwood
- Why I Write About London by Rhys Bowen
- There’s a Jumper in the Boot: Writing British Mysteries for an American Audience by Anne Cleeland
- The Main Stage by Daniel Cole
- So You Want to Write a London Mystery! by Susan Courtright
- Sherlock’s London by Leonard Goldberg
- Robbie’s Wife by Russell Hill
- Fake It Till You Make It, Then Fake It Some More by Alex Grecian
- Jason Davey’s London by Winona Kent
- London Mysteries: History and Crime in the Capital by Anna Sayburn Lane
- Victorian London: City of Mists, Shadows… and Murder by Patrice McDonough
- London’s Urban Armada by Melinda Mullet
- Christie’s Influence on a Victorian-Era Mystery by Neil Plakcy
- London Ghost Story by Lev Raphael
- London Calling by Katherine Reay
- Taking a Bite Out of Food Crime by Jennifer Slee
- The Big Smoke: A Dirty Crime Muse with Spangled Bangs and a Caustic Heart by Saira Viola
- A Long Con in London by Cathi Stoler
- Art, History and Galleries of Beauties at Hampton Court Palace by Nina Wachsman
COLUMNS
- Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews, by Martin Edwards, Aubrey Nye Hamilton, Lesa Holstine, Kathy Boone Reel, Margaret Morse, L.J. Roberts, Craig Sisterson, Lucinda Surber, Linda Triegel, Kate Derie
- Children’s Hour: London Mysteries by Gay Toltl Kinman
- Crime Seen: View from the London Eye by Kate Derie
- Creasey’s Cops by Jim Doherty
- From the Editor’s Desk by Janet A. Rudolph
The Lost Rivers of London
by Aubrey Nye Hamilton
A complicated network of rivers flows under the city of London, forgotten by most for decades but affecting the structure of the streets and buildings above it and quite useful to individuals who want to move through the city unseen. The River Fleet is the largest of the lost rivers. Its headwaters are two streams on Hampstead Heath, each of which was dammed into a series of ponds, the Hampstead Ponds and the Highgate Ponds, in the 18th century. At the southern edge of Hampstead Heath they descend underground as sewers and join in Camden Town. The river gives its name to Fleet Street, the eastern end of which is at what was the crossing over the river known as Fleet Bridge, and is now the site of Ludgate Circus.
In June 2008, the Mayor of London published plans to reinstate some underground rivers. In January 2009, a partnership among the Environment Agency, Natural England, The River Restoration Centre, and the Greater London Authority created the London Rivers Action Plan, on which work continues.
More than twenty tributaries of the Thames became unofficial open sewers as London grew, with significant consequences to public health, including cholera epidemics. Proposals to upgrade the waste system were made as early as the 1700s but the costs were a deterrent. More than a century later in 1856 when conditions were even worse, more proposals followed but were again put off due to the enormous expense. However, after the Great Stink of the summer of 1858, when the heat exacerbated the smell from the open sewers creating an intolerable miasma, Parliament resolved to invest in modern drainage.
Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer and Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and his colleagues, including surveyor and engineer William Haywood, designed an extensive buried arrangement that diverted waste to the Thames Estuary, downstream of the main center of population. Some 100 miles, nearly 160 km, of culverts were constructed, incorporating stretches of the Thames tributaries. Bazalgette’s plan introduced the three embankments to London in which the sewers ran, the Victoria, Chelsea, and Albert Embankments. This structure still serves London today with its population of nine million people.
Bazalgette’s design created high-, mid—and low-level mechanisms that led to outfalls on the Thames south of the city. Pumping stations moved the flow from one level to another, which means that sections of the sewer are often relatively dry and quite safe, if unpleasant, to travel. Thus denizens of the underworld can walk easily and invisibly about the city day or night, a fact that crime fiction writers have used for years.
Dark Assassin, book 15 of Anne Perry’s long-running historical mystery series about William Monk, deals with the 1860s construction of the London sewer system. In his new role as Superintendent of the Thames River Police, Monk has direct insight into the hardscrabble life of the people who lived and scavenged in the underground rivers and culverts. For a contemporaneous view, see Henry Mayhew’s sociological study, London Labour and the London Poor. Originally published in 1851 as a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, it is a pioneering example of investigative journalism and sociological analysis. The articles were published in three volumes, the fourth volume in 1861. Selected portions have also been published. Perry very likely consulted this source as part of the research for her book.
The sewer system served as the hideout of criminal mastermind Professor Ratigan in the Walt Disney 1986 film The Great Mouse Detective. The movie was based on the children’s stories Basil of Baker Street, a series of eight books by Eve Titus and Paul Galdone. Basil is a mouse who lives in the cellar of 221B Baker Street and learns his craft by listening to Sherlock Holmes.
Eleanor Updale wrote five books for young adults about a Victorian burglar turned spy. Montmorency (2003), the first book, is set in 1875, when Montmorency attends a meeting of the Scientific Society and he listens to a presentation by Sir Joseph Bazalgette about the new London wastewater system. Montmorency’s alter ego, the burglar Scarper, uses this knowledge to good effect as he travels through the sewer tunnels under the city.
Dodger by Terry Pratchett (2012) is a fantasy thriller for children that incorporates historical characters and literary references. Dodger is a Victorian street urchin who searches the sewers looking for items of value. He becomes well known through a series of events in which he stops serious harm to others. Along the way he meets Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and the mad barber Sweeney Todd.
Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned her last novel about Peter Wimsey half-written; it was finished by Jill Paton Walsh from Sayers’ notes and published in 1998. Thrones, Dominations was drafted sometime between 1936 and 1938; events in the book clearly set it in 1936. In the beginning, the original river system is explained by Peter to help Harriet with the plot of the current mystery she is writing, and then the same information comes into play when Charles Parker calls Peter in to assist with a case.
The Doctor Who episode from Season 14, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang,” (1977) involves the River Fleet in a Sherlock Holmes/Fu Manchu pastiche mix of mystery and horror. It includes a masked, disfigured villain hiding beneath a theatre who has clear similarities to Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, and the Doctor adopts the role of the Great Detective—even wearing an outfit that many viewers would identify with Sherlock Holmes. The Chinese villain, personified by Li H’sen Chang and the grotesque and murderous Mr. Sin, along with the Chinese Tong, could all have been lifted from Sax Rohmer’s series of Fu Manchu novels. Lots of action in the River Fleet, including a huge rat living in the sewers.
Neil Gaiman’s wildly successful first book Neverwhere (1997) is an intriguing story about Richard Mayhew, an ordinary Scot in London who finds himself transported to another world, including the extensive subterranean river network underneath the London he knew. Fantasy and adventure and mystery rolled into one.
Australian writer Michael Robotham’s second book about Dr Joseph O’Loughlin and DI Vincent Ruiz won the 2005 Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel. In Lost (APA The Drowning Man) Ruiz is fished out of the Thames unconscious, wounded, and with no memory of the events that led to his near drowning. The subsequent investigation involving a missing child takes him back to the Thames and the culverts that lead to it.
The Water House (2005) by Christopher Fowler, the second Bryant & May mystery, finds the senior detectives of the Peculiar Crimes unit investigating the death of an elderly lady found dead inside her own house. Death is determined to be by drowning but she is dry. In the meantime, May lends his support to an odd academic who specializes in the forgotten rivers of London, which eventually helps solve the first case.
The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch is an ongoing series of books started in 2011 about Peter Grant, a probationary constable turned apprentice wizard, whose beat is the magical world beneath and around the City of London. Both urban fantasy and police procedural, the series has ten books and five novellas so far. The series has spun off graphic novels and a role-playing game with the same characters.
Psychiatrist Frieda Klein, main character in a series of eight books by Nicci French, often walks along the path of the subterranean rivers, now built over and serving as sewers to the great city, but the flow of the stream is audible through the grates that appear every so often in the path. She follows the course of the river to its end at the banks of the Thames and then walks back to her home. The first book in the series, Blue Monday (2011), has a detailed map showing the River Fleet within the context of greater London.
“London Underground,” season 11, episode 5 of the BBC One police procedural New Tricks, is about a present-day murder linked to an unsolved murder from twenty years ago. Investigating the new and the old cases leads the detectives to a third murder committed by an occult group in the 1970s, who believed that the River Fleet demanded human sacrifices. Air date was 15 September 2014.
The novel Goodnight, John-Boy (2017) by Pat Mills is the second volume in a series of books set in the world of 1970s British comics publishing. Anti-hero Dave Maudling is a comics author by day and a serial killer by night. He dispatches one victim through an access hatch into the Fleet sewer pipe, where it is washed out into the Thames.
Plague (2020) by Julie Anderson, first book in the Cassandra Fortune series, works the grid of underground rivers, particularly the Tyburn, into the plot as a mechanism for criminals to pass secretly around London. A retired expert from the city’s public works department is called in to assist Scotland Yard, and he brings a collection of maps that explain the layout of the subterranean streams, from the Victorian times to the present, to help bring the criminals to justice.
These are only a few of the instances in which the forgotten rivers have been incorporated into crime fiction. I have read repeatedly of criminals vanishing through the sewer system and did not realize they were actually using the old network of rivers to their advantage. Just how the rivers will be restored to a more pleasant use remains to be seen but when that happens crime fiction authors will have to find an alternate path around London for members of the underworld.
[Editor’s note: The front cover shows “An Illustrated Map of London’s Secret Rivers” by Olivia Whitworth, liviwhit.com.}
Lifelong reader Aubrey Nye Hamilton works as a systems engineer in R&D. In my other life I review newish books on Kevin’s Corner, review older mysteries on Happiness Is a Book, and write occasional pieces for Mystery Readers Journal.
Why I Write About London
by Rhys Bowen
Now I think about it, it’s strange that I didn’t write about London sooner. After all, London has always been a part of my life. As a school child I was taken up to the museums, to plays and the ballet. I went to London University and afterward worked for the BBC in London. I had an apartment just behind Oxford Street in a fashionable part of the city (sharing with three college friends). I shopped in Carnaby Street and was very much the girl of the Sixties with my Mary Quant and my Vidal Sassoon haircut and my white boots. I sang in folk clubs and walked home with my guitar across Soho at two in the morning. I knew the city intimately. But I set my first mystery series in Wales, Land of my Fathers, or actually my relatives, where I often spent my summers. Then I chose to set my second mystery series in New York with Molly Murphy, an Irish immigrant.
It wasn’t until Her Royal Spyness popped into my head that I had to give her a London house and set a story there. That made the research so easy, no research needed for a place I knew so well, or so I thought… mistakes can come when you think you know something and don’t bother to check it. So those first books in the Royal Spyness series contain some errors. I put Claridges on the wrong street. This was unforgivable, as my parents lived next door to the night manager of Claridges.
And I had Lady Georgie walking up Constitution Hill to Buckingham Palace. When I went back the next time I realized it was down Constitution Hill. Whoops. After that I walked anywhere Georgie was going to walk in my story. I chose her a real house in Belgrave Square.
Of course London is the perfect place to set a mystery. It is full of history. Lady Georgie would have walked from Belgrave Square down Piccadilly to shop at Fortnum and Mason, the Burlington Arcade, the chemist that has been there since 1890. So many shops quite unchanged in the past hundred years—gentlemen’s outfitters, perfumiers, hat shops. This part of London, Belgravia, Mayfair, did not suffer much destruction on WWII. On the other hand the City, the financial center around St. Paul’s and the Bank of England, is almost entirely newly built, unless you stumble upon gems like the Roman wall going between high-rises. Much of the East End and the Docklands was bombed and now has new housing estates, gleaming commercial centers and fashionable apartments on the water where there had been grimy rows of slums, warehouses, back alleys. But there are still corners of old London to be found here too. The Prospect of Whitby pub, supposedly one of the oldest in London, still stands beside the Thames, as well as so many other atmospheric pubs: the Old Cheshire Cheese, The Bunch of Grapes, all unchanged in a century. Parts of old Chinatown still exist, although Soho has become gentrified.
So there is enough of the old city to give me inspiration. Baker Street still carries its memories of Sherlock Holmes although there is no 221B in real life. But there was a former HQ of the secret service in one of the ordinary-looking Baker Street houses during WWII. I use it in my book, The Paris Assignment. And the department stores: Selfridges, Harrods, Liberty’s, Fenwicks. All more modern now, but with the same layout, stained glass, polished staircases as their distant past. When I go on research trips I ride London buses, sitting on the top deck so I get to see things you don’t notice from the street. Attic windows, fascinating rooftops for good chases, gargoyles leering from churches, and the palaces. I spent a whole day in Kensington Palace for when I wrote Malice at the Palace. I was only allowed in public areas, but I interviewed all the guards, asking them about the ghosts and other secrets, and got some fascinating answers.
So it’s easy for me to be my heroine making her way through 1930s London, and I’ve been through many exhibits of London during the Blitz, with ration books, wartime fashions and what an air raid felt like. I clearly remember the bomb sites when I was growing up. And the smogs before coal fires were banned. That fog has always played a role in mystery books… footsteps eerily close, street lights only a dim haze, sounds muffled. The perfect scenario for a murder.
I am often asked to blurb books set in London and I can tell immediately whether the author has really been there or just taken a tourist tour. I am quick to point out errors. I once caught a woman taking a train from Yorkshire into Victoria Station in the 1800s. Wrong. Trains from Yorkshire come into King’s Cross. I found someone coming out of the Savoy and taking a hansom cab to a less salubrious part of the city at Charing Cross station. What? I yelled. It’s a quick stroll down the Strand. I used to walk it every day to the BBC at Bush House. And Charing Cross is quite genteel, a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery.
I have learned that if you get something wrong in a book it destroys the whole credibility of the story. So I work hard to get everything right, including, these days, going in person to Claridge’s to make sure I’m on the right street.
Rhys Bowen writes the Royal Spyness series, set in 1930’s London, and has set parts of several stand-alone novels there, including In Farleigh Field, Where the Sky Begins, and her newly released The Rose Arbor, which takes place in the 1960s and features a heroine very like Rhys herself.
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.