Who Slays the Wicked: Some History Will Help

Who Slays the Wicked  (Releases April 2, 2019)

By C. S. Harris

Berkley/Penguin, 352 pages.

★★★

Some books set in the past falter because they get history terribly wrong. Others are confusing because they get it right. The second may be a problem for newer readers of C. S. Harris. Who Slays the Wicked is book 14 in her Sebastian St. Cyr series.

C. S. Harris is the nom de plume of Air Force brat Candice Proctor, who holds a Ph.D. in European history and now lives in Louisiana. Ms Harris writes well and precisely delves into great detail. It’s not a necessity, but it sure would help to know a bit about Hanoverian England to appreciate her St. Cyr novels. Who Slays the Wicked is set in 1814, a time in which the Napoleonic wars are sputtering* to a conclusion. George III is on the throne­–the same sovereign who lost the American colonies. His son, the future George IV, is serving as regent however, as George III went hopelessly insane in 1811.

When Napoleon was defeated for good in 1815, a European-wide peace conference redrew the map of Europe. The same conference planted the seeds for the decline of aristocracy, but they didn’t blossom until the end of World War I in 1918. For another hundred years, nobility lived according to different customs and social codes than their subjects.

If you’ve read other Harris novels, you know that proper breeding sometimes allowed one literally to get away with murder.Not this time. St. Cyr is called upon to unravel the gruesome death of Lord Ashworth and he’s keen to solve it as among the prime suspects is Ashworth’s wife Stephanie, who is also St. Cyr’s niece. Stephanie has recently given birth to twins, but she detested her late husband. As it transpires, so did virtually everyone who ever set eyes on Ashworth except his aged father. As was often the case with children of noble blood, the sadistic Ashworth treated women and the hoi polloi as if they were there for his amusement and abuse. He sexually abused Stephanie, as he did also to a string of mistresses, prostitutes, and gullible innocents. He cheated numerous merchants, one of whom is also a hot suspect, and Ashworth was also abusive to architect Russell Firth. That’s very bad news, as rumors hold that Firth has been stepping out with Stephanie.

The more St. Cyr digs into matters, the longer the suspect list grows. The phrase St. Cyr, his fearless wife Hero, and magistrate Sir Henry Lovejoy repeatedly hear is, “I’m glad he’s dead.” St. Cyr, like much of London, is certain that Ashworth is the culprit behind the deaths of numerous street children.

The wildcard suspects are in London by way of Moscow. All of Europe knows that the Prince Regent and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, had been separated for more than a decade. They had just one child, Princess Charlotte, which made her a desirable marriage catch. Charlotte is affianced to the heir to the Dutch throne, but the czar of Russia hopes to break that alliance and perhaps even entice the Prince Regent to divorce and marry his sister. Harris introduces a fictional character, Ivanna Gagarin, as the consort to the Russian Grand Duchess. She is beautiful, calculating, amoral, and perhaps deadly, though the entire Russian entourage in London had enough contacts with Ashworth to make all of them suspect. The fact that Buckingham Palace tells St. Cyr to back off elevates St. Cyr’s suspicion level. **

Harris juxtaposes court intrigue with the grit, dirt, and crushing poverty of working-class London. She takes us inside seedy pubs and down dark and dangerous alleyways, and introduces us to the stomach-churning world of the night soil men who clean privies, rag and bone collectors, and “pure” finders, the latter of whom roam the street and collect excrement to sell to tanneries. It’s also a world in which ragamuffin children sweep streets, deliver messages, and run errands for anyone who will throw them a few coppers. You can be excused if you conclude that the residents of squalid London have less dirt on their hands than the upper crust. Harris subtly suggests that better times are ahead for some of the down-market parts of London. Firth is modeled on developer James Burton, who financed the building of Regent’s Park, Bloomsbury Square, and numerous other great Georgian projects.

Harris throws us enough red herrings to make fish stew, but if you're not a historian or already immersed in the St. Cyr universe, you might find parts of the novel rather slow going until you catch on to who’s who. It might help to make a cheat sheet as you read. You will need to know, for example, that Lord Ashworth is Anthony Ledger and that St. Cyr is also the Viscount Devlin. All of the aristocratic characters have both a titled and a christened name, and which one you encounter depends upon with whom that character is interacting. This stuff even confuses Brits–friends of mine in London frequently say “some lord or other”­–and it can be quite a puzzlement for those not used to it. 

I am used to it and ultimately found the central mystery intriguing, but I confess that I am more prone to place nobility into the upper class twit category. This is to say I found the novel much more interesting when Sebastian and Hero St. Cyr were cavorting with marginal folks rather than having tea with toffs. I leave open the possibility that I came into the series too late in the game. I enjoyed Who Slays the Wicked, but I’m not holding my breath for the next St. Cyr installment.

Rob Weir

* I used the term "sputtering" because it took separate campaigns to subdue Napoleon. In 1814, Napoleon abdicated when a European alliance captured Paris. He was exiled to the island of Elba, but escaped less than a year later, raised an army, and invaded Belgium. Shortly after his defeat at Waterloo in June 1815, he surrendered and was sent to the remote island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821.

** In real life, Russian meddling did break Charlotte’s planned marriage, though she eventually married a German prince, not a Russian.

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