Genre: Historical, Mystery, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
“The greatest gift one man may give another is his trust.”
Barbary Fleet, 1890.
Standing stones, messages written in symbols, and the language of the deaf. It falls to Lord Clearwater to unlock the mystery of Dalston Blaze and his deaf friend, Joe Tanner, two young men arrested for committing ‘unnatural offences’ at the Hackney workhouse.
Dalston hopes for a prison sentence. It’s the only way to save his life. Instead, he is bailed to the Larkspur Academy on Lord Clearwater’s Cornish estate, where there is only one rule: honesty above all else. For Dalston, this means confronting his past, learning to trust, and admitting his secrets. Joe is the key, but Joe is missing, and his location is locked deep inside a memory seen in sign language, and clouded by eighteen years of workhouse life.
If Dalston remains silent, the immoral workhouse master and his sadistic schoolteacher will continue to inflict pain and suffering on all inmates of the Hackney workhouse. If he tells the truth, he and Joe will die.
The Guardians of the Poor is a combination of mystery, adventure and male romance, set in 1890. It draws on first-hand accounts of workhouse life at the time, and is the first of a new series of mysteries set in the Clearwater world.
The Review
For the start of this new series, Jackson Marsh offers up his usual deep historical research, plus a fast-paced story that explores the ugly reality of Victorian England while creating a fantasy world in which Archer, Viscount Clearwater, is doing his best to bring some justice to the lives of those at the bottom of the socio-economic heap. As I’ve come to expect from the Clearwater series, which evoke for me the novels of both Dickens and Trollope, emerging science and technology are brought into play, adding both interest and savor to the author’s elegant, authentic language.
Dalston Blaze and Joseph Tanner don’t know it, but their world is going to change. Inmates of the Hackney Union Workhouse—each having his own dark backstory—these two teenagers are about to be tried for the absurd and cruel charge of “intention to commit unnatural offences.” Actually, Joe Tanner has done a runner, evading Scotland Yard’s finest, and it is Dalston alone who faces the so-called justice of Her Majesty’s court.
And then things start to go sideways. A learned and glib barrister by the name of Sir Easterby Cresswell has replaced Dalston’s incompetent defense attorney; and a young police officer with an Irish accent begins behaving oddly as the defendant is shown into the courtroom. Without ever quite understanding what’s going on, Dalston Blaze finds himself in the hands of Jimmy Wright and Silas Hawkins, and on his way to Clearwater House.
The book establishes the promised Larkspur Academy at Larkspur Hall; a place where Lord Clearwater and his crew of smart, loyal young men can give native talent a chance to blossom and grow. We meet the eccentric and erudite Fleet (only Fleet!), and the first few inmates of the new academy, which isn’t a school, but a sort of hothouse where talent is nurtured and social wrongs are righted.
As always with Jackson Marsh, there is a puzzle to be solved. Archer Clearwater isn’t just out to save Dalston Blaze; he suspects that Blaze and Tanner are in trouble, and it is that trouble that really drives the plot and keeps the excitement and anxiety at a high level. We do, however, get to fully enjoy Dalston’s gradual acclimation to a life of which he’d never even dreamed. We see Lord Clearwater’s rarified world through an uneducated, impoverished teen’s eyes, wonder alternating with fear as he gradually accepts that this handsome aristocrat is indeed something he’s never known before: a good man who wishes him well.
The Clearwater series was all about Archer Riddington coming into his own (well, with lots of other things happening, too). This first book suggests the moving and complicated stories that will accompany the development of Lord Clearwater’s social experiment. This first installment was exciting and moving. I’ve no doubt the rest will live up to this one.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
