Another Miss!

The current Saturday Slaughters read is The Way of All  Flesh by Ambrose Parry, Ambrose Parry being a pen name for books written by Christopher Brookmyre, a writer of crime fiction with a big following in Scotland, and his wife, Marisa Haetzman, who is an anaesthetist. 

It is set in Edinburgh at the time of Queen Victoria. The main male protagonist is a just qualified medical doctor with a shady past, no visible means of support and a predilection for getting into trouble. The main female protagonist is a maid in an upper class (medical) household who is clever but held back from fulfilling her potential because of her gender and her class. I am falling asleep even as I type this list of clichéd characterisations and situations. (To make matters worse the maid looks after yet another C19 cliché, the verging on desperate spinster. Just to underline the difficulties of the women of the time, although it's really not necessary,  maid and mistress are reading and discussing Jane Eyre and are of course in total admiration of the brave heroine who self defines as being worthy of a space in society without a man. Despite the fact that the minute said man is free she snatches his hand off when he offers her marriage.)

The big not quite USP of this book is that the newly qualified doctor has been taken on as an apprentice by Joseph Simpson, a real life medical doctor who pioneered the use of anaesthetics in Midwifery, to the great relief of Queen Victoria and many many women since. 

I am giving up on this book because  - boredom really. I do not need to read any further to know that some of the plot will hang on a back street abortionist/doctor performing illegal abortions badly, because why otherwise have they chosen Dr Simpson to house our hero and heroine? I just cannot be bothered. I will however be attending the discussion because I want to be sure I am not wrong on this point. And if I am I shall come here and say so. 

Meanwhile if I want Edinburgh-set Victorian crime I have on Audible all twelve seasons of  BBC4's  Inspector McLeavy. Twelve series, none of them fewer than six episodes, some longer and do you know what? Not one back street butcher in a single one of them. You see, it can be done.