The Infidel Stain by M J Carter, book review: A turbulent trip around London’s underworld

The author's meticulous research is lightly worn and highly digestible

Few people associate Eros with moral worthiness, yet the winged god presiding over the secular hell of Piccadilly Circus is a memorial to Lord Shaftesbury, Victorian philanthropist who did so much to protect children from abuse. His monument is a perfect ambiguous expression of Victorian conflict between lust and righteousness. A literary incarnation of the driven Shaftesbury-type philanthropist is a leading character in MJ Carter’s new novel, along with a tight-laced scary authoritarian sister, the welfare worker from hell.

These two, along with a cast of underworld characters and scenes from turbulent political life, are part of the seething 19th-century London into which the heroes we have encountered in Carter’s previous book, The Strangler Vine, are plunged on their return from India. The cunning secret agent Jeremiah Blake and dashing young officer William Avery have successfully negotiated their way through thugs and jungles and are now embroiled in the far darker world of the metropolitan rookeries, where crooks, politicians and do-gooders are mixed up in a gory mystery that begins with the mutilated body of a printer discovered sprawled out on his printing-press by a young woman desperately searching for a warm refuge from the streets.

And what did he print? A category of “Victorian literature”, still not featuring on your average English syllabus: The Arse Bishop and his Friends, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels, The Lustful Turk. Carter has certainly done her research thoroughly, so much so that it is possible to trace her Victorian slums and alleys beneath the modern city. You might have purchased the above titles from the pornography merchants who haunted the district that is now the blameless Aldwych.

Also convincingly rendered is the tragic attempt and failure of the Chartists to give the working class an element of political power. Carter makes these turbulent politics fresh and interesting, meshing in seamlessly with her portrait of the London poor.

When another publisher of Lady Bumtickler et al becomes the victim of another bloody murder, the possibility of his involvement in more serious radical material arises. Avery provides the brawn and Blake the brains as they struggle to disentangle the mystery, delving beneath the hypocrisies of polite society.

As with Carter’s previous book featuring this lively pair, meticulous research is lightly worn and highly digestible in this action-packed rampage through the alleys and mansions of the teeming capital.

Order for £12.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030