Victorian Tableaux Vivants #2: Waxwork (1978), by Peter Lovesey

Long before the "period mystery" had become a common feature of the genre, distinguished English crime writer Peter Lovesey gave us the Sergeant Cribb series of Victorian detective novels.  Lovesey published eight of these tales between 1970 and 1978.  Not only were they well-received by critics and lay readers alike, they inspired a popular British television detective series, Cribb.  Waxwork, the eighth and last of these books, ended the series on a high note in 1978.  Since then Peter Lovesey has given us the short-lived but much-loved (certainly by this reader) Bertie, Prince of Wales series and the current, long-running, award-winning Peter Diamond series, as well as such praised standalones as The False Inspector Dew, Rough Cider, On the Edge and The Reaper.

Florence Maybrick
accused Victorian poisoner

In a case of coincidence, Lovesey and Julian Symons in 1978 both published notable Victorian mysteries that center around lovely, enigmatic blondes suspected of poisoning murders: respectively Waxwork and The Blackheath Poisonings (see my recent review of The Blackheath Poisonings).

hardcover American edition of
Waxwork (1978)

Both novels are still in print today, Waxwork in an attractive edition from Soho Press.  Since its publication in 1978 Waxwork has been considered one of the best of the Lovesey Sergeant Cribb titles.

Generally, I think, the Cribb mysteries are seen as lighter in tone: charming rather than dark and somber like Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings. Yet Waxwork strikes me as rather dark and somber too. Ruth Rendell praised the novel for its  depiction of what feels like "an account of a real-life crime." "Nothing strikes a false note," she declared. "Nothing seems contrived."  The late novelist Sarah Gainham asserted that in Waxwork a "feeling of authentic horror is produced."  I agree with both assessments. Waxwork is a gripping, fascinating tale.

In short order in Waxwork the beautiful Marian Cromer (see above left) is arrested and confesses to the crime of poisoning (with potassium cyanide) the assistant of the fashionable society photographer to whom she is married.  Her victim, she explains, had been blackmailing her, on account of his knowledge of certain risque photos she had allowed to be taken of herself several years earlier.  Since the crime was coldly premeditated, Marian has been sentenced to death by hanging.

Soho edition (2010)

As Marian's day of execution nears, new evidence arises leading the police to question whether Marian actually had means of access to the locked poison cabinet from which the cyanide was obtained.  Cribb is put on the case to discover how Marian Cromer got to the keys.  But Cribb comes to suspect that Marian Cromer simply could not have gotten to the keys, and that someone else committed the crime....

Despite the small circle of suspects in his novel, Peter Lovesey manages to present a quite interesting crime problem.  He also builds up a considerable level of suspense (of course the "death row convict" plot is not original to Lovesey, going back at least to Philip Macdonald's The Noose, 1930; but Lovesey does an exemplary job all round with it).

As with The Blackheath Poisonings, I would like to say more about a number of the novel's interesting aspects, but I am constrained by the reviewer's sacred obligation to avoid the offense of spoiling.  Hence I will confine myself to a few comments about Lovesey's handling of the matter of class in the Victorian age.

Class is omnipresent in Waxwork, whether in Cribb's relations with his own smug superiors or Marian Cromer's relations with her jailers (Cromer's jail scenes are grim; Lovesey shows how Newgate prison was one place where members of the lower class could turn the tables on their "betters").  In other books I have read in this series, the class satire was amusing; yet here it more feels depressing.  Eight years into the series Cribb still has not attained  a promotion from sergeant to inspector; one begins to despair with Cribb of this ever actually happening.

Newgate cell

There also is, I should add, a subplot concerning the Newgate hangman and Tussaud's Wax Museum (hence the title), which adds its own macabre note.

Is Waxwork the best of Lovesey's Cribb tales?  It may well be.  It certainly feels the closest in spirit to The Blackheath Poisonings, with its uncozy atmosphere of grim anxiety.

I retain a great affection for my first Cribb (and first Lovesey), the brilliantly titled Wobble to Death, with its fantastically original setting of a "wobble" (read the book to find out what that is!); but all the Cribbs make eminently good reading and all, fortunately, are back in print, courtesy of Soho Press.  Don't miss them.

Peter Lovesey