Prepare to be discombobulated by this bonkers crime caper
The Empress Murders
Toby Schmitz
Allen and Unwin, $32.99
Brilliant, bonkers and bloody - The Empress Murders is what you get when you let a mischievous thespian schooled in Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and Agatha Christie loose on the crime genre. This is a tragicomic, ambitiously wordy, and wild excursion into the territory of the traditional locked-room mystery, set on a ship with a serial killer on the loose.
It begins with a Shakespearian prologue, although it's not called that, spoken by the ship herself who affectionately recalls her origins as a leaf in a puddle, through her many subsequent incarnations as a sea-faring vessel, and culminating in her current manifestation as The Empress of Australia, a luxury ocean liner and 'a cast-iron idea'. She's now 'churning the Atlantic run' in 1925 on the way to New York with a full manifest of passengers and one corpse. The scene is set.
It comes as no surprise to learn that this outlandish excursion into the crime genre started out as a play 20 years ago and has been a long time in gestation. There are numerous quasi-theatrical moments as we encounter the diverse passengers and crew, although there are also interior reflections and backstories that could only exist in this kind of capacious, meandering crime novel.
It begins on C Deck with the handsome, somewhat threadbare, Mr Frey from Australia. He's survived the Second World War after his mother signed him up the day he finished school, spent time in Weimar Berlin and now fancies himself as a Dadaist poet, slipping words around 'like mahjong tiles'. And he's just been invited into the first-class lounge for dinner, so up we go.
While Agatha Christie usually assembled her suspects in the library for the big reveal at the end, Schmitz summons his ensemble at the start, under the watchful eye of Chief Steward Rowling who is not feeling well and will undoubtably feel worse. An announcement is about to be made by the ship's dismal detective, Inspector Daniels, that a young Bengali deckhand has been murdered in the night, his body mutilated.
Be prepared - like all the best Jacobean tragedies, there's going to be a lot of gore. Indeed, there are moments when the elaborate crime-drama edifice morphs into slasher horror. Like all the best shockers, these moments are laugh-out-loud, discombobulating in their bloody excess. But don't worry, the Empress reassures the reader, while we might be in for a rough crossing, 'I've got you'.
And so she has, along with all the onboard intrigues that range from a memorable mobster in full white tie and tails, 'his lubricious curls tamed as best he can', who travelled to London with one suitcase and is headed back to the US with 'considerably more freight'. Chief Steward Rowling has his number.
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