The Counterfeit Detective

Simpson Grears

(Rymour, £14.99)

A former lecturer at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret College, Glaswegian Simpson Grears brought out his first book, the short story collection The Foot of the Walk Murders, in 2020. Long-listed for the CWA Dagger Award, it was deliberately aimed away from the Tartan Noir style towards a more traditional type of detective story.

The Counterfeit Detective is something else again, throwing together Ripper-era London, 1970s Edinburgh, sado-masochistic erotica, eugenics, bibliophiles and vision quests – as well as a murder or three – and giving them a good stir.

In Pittsburgh, 1973, a University professor of Scottish birth named Robert Nowell comes across a published book of poetry and a handwritten notebook from 1900, both by the minor English poet John Ledbury.

Ledbury, legend has it, was hired by Arthur Conan Doyle to reply to letters sent to Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street. Well aware that his tenured life is a bit too comfortable, Nowell is on the lookout for a meaningful project to embark on, and he finds it in the shocking tale inscribed in Ledbury’s notebook.

Crossing the Atlantic, he shuttles between London, Glasgow and Edinburgh in pursuit of the truth of Ledbury’s story, hopeful of finding a lead in the West Port bookshop where the poetry book was purchased decades earlier, and which is still owned by the same, ancient, proprietor.

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Chapters written from Nowell’s point of view are interspersed with Ledbury’s account of his extraordinary experiences in the year 1900. It’s a strange, murky tale in which the poet, on the strength of his Conan Doyle connection, becomes involved in the police investigation of the murders of several women – a disturbing echo of the Whitechapel Murders a decade earlier.

At the same time, Ledbury’s need for work has brought him to the attention of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a book collector with a sideline in commissioning erotic writings tailored to the tastes of favoured clients. Ledbury is an old-fashioned country lad from Godalming, and the kind of practices he’s being asked to write about are alien to him, but the examples of sado-masochistic literature provided by Ashbee actually help to give him some insight, he believes, into the murders.

What’s more, he’s being plagued by vivid dreams of some monstrous plot being hatched in the heart of London. As Robert Nowell reads Ledbury’s account in an Edinburgh hotel room in 1973, he too starts to have strange dreams, the notebook’s words taking sinister root in his unconscious mind.

The Counterfeit Detective explores some unexpected and esoteric areas, Ledbury’s dreams and symbols drawn on corpses prompting the police to research the beliefs of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the Theosophy movement.

Aleister Crowley even makes a cameo. In the book’s latter stages, Grears is throwing so many curveballs that it comes as no surprise when Nowell eventually complains that “reality was receding from me”. The resolution doesn’t come out of nowhere, but it’s still a very weird turn for a whodunnit to take.

Grears steers a course through this twisty, atmospheric pea-souper with great assurance and consistently good writing. Nowell’s childhood in small-town Virginia and his early years in academia are sketched out early on, adding texture and background that will bear fruit later when Ledbury’s manuscript starts hitting a little too close to home, and providing a stark contrast to a Victorian London of such coiled menace and concealed depravity that it could indeed have sprung from Ledbury’s fevered dreams. It’s an accomplished debut novel that deserves far greater exposure than its origins in a tiny Perth-based independent publisher would normally allow for.