London, 1893 - deadly doings are afoot in the British Museum and private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn must unravel a mystery involving a mummy, a giant ruby and a murder, in Will Thomas's Heart of the Nile .
Cyrus Barker, along with his former assistant and now partner Thomas Llewelyn, is the premier enquiry agent in all of 19th century London, and beyond. They've thwarted the designs of villains and crooks off all sorts, helped Scotland Yard crack their most challenging cases, and worked for the Her Majesty's Government at the very highest levels. But nothing has been quite as challenging and dangerous as the latest case that comes to find them.
In 1893, a volunteer at the British Museum makes a startling discovery. When examining a mummy in the museum's collection, he discovers there is a giant ruby in the shape of a heart buried in the chest of the mummy. Even more startling, the mummy might well be Cleopatra. The following morning, the volunteer is found floating in the Thames and the ruby has gone missing. Hired by the victim’s wife to learn the truth behind his death, Barker and Llewelyn find themselves in the crosshairs - now they must avoid a violent street gang, a ruthless collector, and the British Museum itself in order to find the killer and safeguard the gem.

My Review:

This was definitely one of the “fun” entries in the Barker and Llewelyn series. Not that death is ever “fun” per se, but that the story surrounding this investigation had a lot of fascinating if familiar elements wrapped around the unfortunate murder that kickstarts the story.

It begins in both triumph and tragedy. The triumph that British Museum volunteer Phillip Addison has discovered something both unexpected and precious inside one one of the many, many mummies stacked like cordwood in the museum’s basement.

Unfortunately for Addison, his discovery occurred near midnight, when he shouldn’t have been working in the first place. Even more problematic, in his extreme – but justified – enthusiasm he walked out of the museum with the more transportable part of the discovery inside his pocket. He intended to go directly to his supervisor’s home, in the middle of the night, and convince the man to come back to the museum with him.

Unfortunately for him, he was followed. He was followed ineptly enough to be nervous about it, so he stopped off at a friend’s apartment and dropped that precious item off for safekeeping. But without that evidence, his boss wouldn’t budge out his front door, sending Addison back to his own home with a flea in his ear.

He never got there. Instead, his body was found in the Thames late the next day. AFTER his wife had contacted Barker and Llewelyn to find her missing husband. Which, of course, they did.

What they did not find was answers. All that they, and the widow, received was a lot of hemming and hawing on the part of the British Museum, threats to their reputations and livelihoods, and a growing suspicion that very little in this case was exactly what it seemed.

Not even the mummy, although the precious thing that poor Addison found inside it was certainly real enough. An enormous, uncut ruby in the shape of heart, at the center of an ever-growing pool of blood and greed.

Escape Rating A: I’ve been flailing a bit recently, and worried about what I was going to read in my next “flail and bail” after I finish Tim Sullivan’s The Tailor this month, so I decided to return to Barker and Llewelyn’s late Victorian Era investigations to tide me over whatever this is.

And it worked – as they always do.

As much as poor Addison’s death is ultimately both tragic and pointless, and as much trouble and danger (not in the same way) this investigation causes for Barker and Llewelyn but especially Thomas Llewelyn, the stuff surrounding the case was both fascinating and nostalgic for this reader.

First of all, the stuff about mummies in general, and the difficulty of establishing the identity of this particular mummy, all of that was based in historical facts AND historical fiction. There really were mummy parties, mummies really were ground up to make various and sundry quack nostrums, and the British Museum did get a lot of its “stock” of antiquities through random rich adventurers buying up whatever they could get their grubby hands on and shipping it back home.

(One piece of the nostalgia I was referring to is that The Mummy of Mayfair, the second book in the Irregular Detective series, begins with exactly the kind of “mummy party” referenced in Heart of the Nile. And it goes just as astray as this case in some of the same directions. A second bit of even fonder memory is wrapped up in the person of Flinders Petrie, a real-life archaeologist who really did kick off the practice of scientific archaeology and Egyptology who was a secondary character – and rival – to Amelia Peabody and her husband Radcliffe Emerson in their series. I still miss Amelia.)

But speaking of the Irregular Detective series, both that series and this one are in dialogue with the Great Detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. One of those “irregular detectives”, Timothy Badger, is one of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars, all grown up and doing his best to follow in his mentor’s footsteps.

Barker and Llewellyn are enquiry agents in the same mold as Holmes and Watson, but with important differences. Barker and Llewelyn’s investigations take place in the same time period, and tread some of the same ground. But differently as their author has the advantage of hindsight, distance and perspective on situations and events that were contemporary life for Arthur Conan Doyle. Who is, himself, paid homage to in this story through the introduction of Andrew Cullen Davis, an author penning a series of detective stories similar to Holmes, badgering Llewelyn for material he can fictionalize for his own readers.

As often happens with this series, I had to do some investigation of my own to see where history left off and fiction began. Cleopatra has been fascinating people for millennia. How she is perceived is dependent on whether one’s impression was formed entirely by Shakespeare, or whether modern scholarship – and acknowledgment that as both a female ruler AND an enemy the Romans were bound to demonize her at every turn.

Whichever historical version one subscribes to, she is still every bit as mesmerizing as she is in this story, even as a mummy. Whether it’s really her or not. Which is something that we STILL don’t know. Her tomb has never been found. We don’t even know whether she was mummified or not. What matters for this story is that it’s all still a mystery.

One of the things that is exposed in this story, is that I’m still fascinated with the way that Barker and Llewelyn’s backgrounds allow them to both present portraits of self-made men made very well indeed, but also to observe other so-called outsiders as just who they are without attaching upper class perspectives and prejudices but still observing that the people they often operate among often do. The series does a marvelous job of NOT falling into the trap that many historical fiction protagonists do, where they have our attitudes in their settings and come off as anachronistic. Barker and Llewelyn feel like men of their time – as much as we can judge that from here. They don’t mimic our values, they just come into their own stories from perspectives that did not used to be treated as protagonists.

Which leads directly to the way this story ends, and the number of blind spots that Barker and Llewelyn see in those working around them. The British Museum never questions itself – or its officers – about any part they might have played in this mess. Motives are ascribed to everyone they consider “beneath” them without thought about the way that people really live and the compromises they are forced to make. They never even consider looking into the rot at the heart of their prestigious institution – although many recognize its presence but are unwilling to examine the cost and consequences of their own privileges.

And all of that led directly to poor Addison’s death and every single thing that happens after it. Something that Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, outsiders themselves who have lived other and much less privileged lives – no matter how much their circumstances have improved – understand and empathize with.

I’m still enjoying this series immensely, so I’ll be back in the not too distant future (future past or past future?) with the next book in the series, Death and Glory. But I’m getting a little worried, as after that there are currently only two books left. I clearly need to start hunting for a new comfort read mystery series NOW to tide me over!