Which of the cast of reprobates in this novel shall swing from the fatal tree, the Tyburn gallows? Perhaps better to ask which shall not. All seem condemned souls, except maybe one Billy Archer, a printer’s devil with inky fingers and hopes of literary immortality. “I was born with a very noose around my neck,” he announces. “Entangled in the cord of life that joined me to my dear mother.” The popular superstition follows that he cannot therefore be hanged a second time. Reader, can you guess his fate?
Jake Arnott is not kind to his characters. His flair for noir – corruption, menace and the psychosexuality of gangsters – transposes well into “Romeville”, the London underworld of the 1720s and its celebrity criminals. This is his seventh novel, and his first excursion out of the 20th century, but how naturally he handles the detail of the thieves’ subculture, noting, for example, the “wretched affidavit men” hanging around outside the Old Bailey wearing “wisps of straw in their shoe buckles to advertise that they will swear false evidence for the right price”.
He gifts his prig-nappers and pot-valiant bawds the kind of one-liners Moll Flanders would have rejoiced in: in a climactic scene, Jonathan Wild, the formerly mighty thief-taker general, implores the antiheroine Edgeworth Bess to help him escape the gallows. Once his sweetheart, she chillingly replies in cant “flash” language: “Nix my doll.” No way, sweetheart.
The texture of Romeville is created not by those overworked tropes of historical fiction, the smells, the customs, the clothes – but by words. “Dandyprat! Lully-prig! Chittiface!” explodes Bess in anger, or, wishing her interlocutor would shut up: “Oh, stow your widds.” A glossary is provided but in almost every instance the context is enough. And so we learn on the hoof that “rabbit-catchers” are midwives, “phiz-mongers” paint portraits for a living, “squeakers” are children and “Daisyville” is the countryside. Mostly this works wonderfully well, though as with Polari or Cockney rhyming slang, a little goes a long way and exclamations such as “The lully-prig’s gone and got himself scrabbled” can sometimes feel forced.
Arnott’s other books have featured Aleister Crowley, Judy Garland and Robert Baden-Powell as characters, and here the triumvirate of low-life protagonists are real people, storied names in their time. Jack Sheppard, the charismatic jailbreaker, was the inspiration for Macheath in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera; Bess was a soubriquet of Elizabeth Lyon, a real-life Moll Flanders whose biography is more folklore than fact; and Wild was the self-styled “thief‑taker general”, a lawmaker turned lawbreaker whose life was written by Henry Fielding. Once notorious, these three are now far from well known; this leaves Arnott slightly breathless from having to explain their status, but he still has fun adding to their lore. Bess falls for Jack when she sees him shimmy up the side of a building, quick and elegant “as a mouser”. Though Bess goes to bed with Wild many times, she never catches him sleeping.
The women in Arnott’s work are often the toughest nuts of all – think of the adamantine showgirl Ruby Ryder in The Long Firm – and Bess’s narrative arc takes her from innocent country girl (called “long-meg” because of her height) to raddled mother of a prison prostitution racket. Her sexuality is bleakly compromised and opportunistic. Arnott never sentimentalises the desperation and lawlessness of the time.
However, every work of historical fiction risks becoming pastiche. The 18th-century cliches abound here, from dubious authorship (a first-person narrative which we soon learn to doubt) right down to night-time escapes from prison using torn-up petticoats. London’s old topography, such as Sodomites Walk in the wasteland of Moorfields, and contemporary crazes such as the madness of the South Sea Bubble, are used for colour. But a Defoe-like sense of moral ambiguity is also present, redeeming the enterprise from the vacuity of pastiche. When Bess rides out to track down an old foe with “murder in my heart and a popp in my bung” (pistol in my handbag), the encounter is rendered absolutely gripping because we believe her capable of murder yet wish her redemption, a doublethink worthy of an 18th-century pamphleteer.
The playwright Gay is a character always eavesdropping on the canting crew of the Hundreds of Drury. He used their patter and exploits for his “Newgate pastoral”, the hugely successful 1728 Beggar’s Opera, produced by John Rich, and popularly said to have “made Gay rich and Rich gay”. With Arnott’s record for successful TV adaptations of his work, it may be that three long-dead career criminals still have more to give.
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