BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS
Anne Perry
Ballantine Books
Mystery
ISBN: 9780345469311

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Anne Perry is a prolific writer of historical and Victorian-era mysteries, most of which feature either Thomas and Charlotte Pitt or William Monk. BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS is her 25th novel with the Pitts. The only difference here is that Thomas Pitt does not have the assistance of his wife, Charlotte. Instead, he must call upon his own cockney servant, Gracie Phipps, to go undercover as a member of the Buckingham Palace household staff in order to assist him in uncovering the guilty party or parties.

In BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS, Perry has created a Sherlock Holmes-like “locked door” mystery. The body of a prostitute has been found, nude and butchered, in the linen closet. This has all the markings of a series of gruesome murders that occurred a few years prior in the Whitechapel area of London. What makes this case particularly difficult for Inspector Thomas Pitt is the fact that no one can come and go easily from Buckingham Palace without being seen by the guards. Therefore, Pitt has to interview all the people who were inside Buckingham Palace the night of the murder.

The list of suspects includes four proper couples as well as all of the household and personal servants. The Queen is traveling abroad, so the Prince and Princess of Wales are left to entertain the couples at Buckingham Palace. The purpose of their visit is for the four gentlemen, led by the elder Cahoon Dunkeld, to get the Prince’s support on a proposed railway that would extend from London into the heart of Africa; it would open up commerce in a major way and make Great Britain the true power in Europe. Meanwhile, both the personal servants of each of the guests and those employed in the Palace are infiltrated by Gracie.

The head of the Buckingham Palace servant staff is Mr. Tyndale, the only person on the inside aware that the new housekeeper, Sophie, is actually a plant working for Pitt and the Special Services Branch. The fact that the Prince of Wales and his four gentlemen guests had a private party following a meeting that included local street prostitutes makes things even more difficult for Pitt as he is expected to sift through clues in a discretionary and expedient manner.

What transpires is quite reminiscent of the British “Upstairs, Downstairs” class dramas that have been seen in many prior novels of this period as well as in films like Gosford Park. While Perry’s writing is always engaging, I found it far more interesting to read the passages involving the “downstairs” group of servants --- written in the same cockney voice as Gracie Phipps herself. The “upstairs” suspects, the well-to-do guests of the Prince of Wales, come across as tiresome and boorish after lengthy dialogues, and it was difficult for me to decide who to hang the murder rap on since they were all very unlikable and morally questionable characters.

The story and investigation take a significant turn when the wife of one of the gentlemen turns up dead in the same manner as the butchered prostitute. Clues point to the husband of the victim, who is also the daughter of elder gentlemen Cahoon Dunkeld. Perry produces several clues and red herrings, including a mysterious box of books delivered to Dunkeld the night of the first murder, blood found in bottles of Port, broken pieces of china from an expensive Limoges dish and a set of the bloody bed sheets that came from the absent Queen’s bedroom. Pitt is also made aware that a woman had been murdered in similar fashion a few years prior during a scouting trip to Africa in which one of the gentlemen was present.

Though I found the upper class guests and the Prince of Wales to be fairly unlikable characters, the constant secrecy and misdirection this tale poses nevertheless kept me guessing until the end. I particularly enjoyed the fact that one of the characters was reading THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde, a tale of a man seeking to change his own destiny by eternally preserving his youth. In similar ways, the gentlemen are proposing to alter their own --- and Great Britain’s --- destiny by building an African railway and are tempting fate. The proposal of this grand undertaking is best described by another character, developer Watson Forbes, who states: “Such a railway would cut through the heart of a country and vandalize the soul of it.”

It is safe to say that several of the souls in BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS are permanently vandalized by a greed that leads them to commit unthinkable acts.

    --- Reviewed by Ray Palen

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