Crimes and Survivors (2024 TBR) and "Unseen," short story (ebook version), by Sarah Smith
It has been years since I've re-read Sarah Smith's trilogy of Edwardian mysteries centered around a family from Boston. I was reminded of that last year, when they were among the books I had to move for my foundation repair work. I kept them on the shelves afterwards, unlike many that I decided I wouldn't re-read again. I must have had them in the back of my mind, because in December something suddenly made me check to see what else Sarah Smith has written. To my surprise, I found not just a fourth novel, but also a short story set between the first and second books. I was excited enough on finding new stories, but then I realized that the novel is set in part on the Titanic's fatal voyage. That had me clicking the order button and waiting impatiently for the book.
I've written before about the second and third novels, The Knowledge of Water and A Citizen of the Country. As I said in one of those posts, these aren't mysteries in the "who done it" sense, they are more novels of suspense. The central mysteries have to do with identity. In the first three, it is the identity of Alexander von Riesden, a scientist and an Austrian baron who is shocked to discover how much he looks like members of an American family from Boston. In this fourth novel, it is his wife's identity that comes into question:
It's 1912. America is the land of Jim Crow, of lynchings and segregation. And a young white concert pianist has just discovered that the grandfather she barely knows may be black. She has a family. She has a child. She can't be black, because her brothers and sisters and son can't be. She can't be black, because she couldn't play the piano in America. She follows her grandfather onto the newest, safest, biggest ship in the world, to learn the truth--the right truth, the one that will save her family. But after the iceberg, she finds the truth is more complicated than black and white. More daring, more loving, and far more dangerous. And instead of a convenient truth, what she'll have to find is a different America. (cover blurb)
The central question is an absorbing one, and also very complicated. I was constantly surprised by the turns that story took, and I am still thinking about the ending. But running along side it, and intertwined with it, is a story of the Titanic's passengers. From the "Acknowledgements," which are also a bibliography, it is clear that Sarah Smith has thoroughly researched the Titanic, and I think she succeeds in bringing to life not just the voyage and the tragedy of its sinking, but also the effects on those who survived. I had a vague memory of silent film star Dorothy Gibson among the survivors, but I did not realize that she immediately set to work making a film about the sinking, filming in New York harbor (Smith's characters are drawn into the film).
The short story "Unseen" is set in 1906, in Paris. It is the story of how Reisden buys Jouvet Medical Analyses, which plays such a big part in the second and third books. He intends to close it down after the death of its director, but first he has to resolve a last open case, a mother accused of murdering her son.
The last chapter of Crimes and Survivors felt like an ending to the stories of these characters. I wondered if it might be the end of the series. But the novel was published in 2020, at the height of the Pandemic. The short story "Unseen" was published in October of last year, which gives me hope that Sarah Smith might still have more stories to tell in this world.
