Blog Tour Review - Nocturne With Gaslamps by Matthew Francis

Blog Tour Review - Nocturne With Gaslamps by Matthew Francis

Hastings Wimbury has always dreamt of playing Hamlet, but for now he works as a theatre gas-boy. Here, he tends to a gas chandelier so powerful it creates its own weather, and limelight machines that can throw a shadow onto a wall ten miles away.

When Hastings suddenly disappears, his fiancée Flora sets out to find him with the help of Cassie, her rival in love who is more preoccupied with the ghosts terrorising the streets of London. Soon total darkness is imposed upon the city, and they realise that something far more sinister is at hand…

Ladies aren’t supposed to solve mysteries, but this is a matter of life and death.

 Nocturne With Gaslamps is a very curious book. It's a crime fiction mystery, and from the blurb I assumed it would be a hunt for a missing person, but Hastings Wimbury doesn't go missing until halfway through the book, and as he's one of the three point-of-view characters, it's hard to really describe him as missing. Temporarily misplaced might be more appropriate.

There are hints and suggestions before that about other crimes being committed, but they rarely rise above the level of petty crimes. A few picked pockets and some missing theatre equipment doesn't feel like the crime of the century, even if that century is the nineteenth.

Hastings himself is a fairly lacklustre main character. He seems very content to just go along with anything that is suggested to him, from getting a job as a gas-boy in the theatre to embarking on a life of crime. He never really questions anything, displays no strong emotions or motivations apart from the overall one to become an actor if the opportunity happens to put itself squarely before him, and is, quite frankly, a little dull.

Quite why he has two intelligent and determined women so interested in him is one of the book's greatest mysteries, but Flora and Cassie are much more likeable as characters. They seem strong willed and resourceful, if a little unsure just what they should be doing. Sometimes their uncertainty is taken to frankly comic lengths, as events unfold around them quite dramatically and they just sort of bumble through it. The one thing connecting them, their twin engagements to Hastings, doesn't seem to cause much of an issue between them, or if it is it is one they are easily able to move past.

The novel does quite well with its thematic elements. The themes of light and darkness are explored quite well, and related to poetry, to theatre, and more. This plays nicely into the setting, with the advent of street lighting banishing the night from the streets of the big city. The imaginative setting of Cimmeria shows us a different view of a world, the eternal darkness of that place contrasting sharply with the ever light London. 

Unfortunately, I think this is ultimately let down. The crimes are never really enough to justify the title "Mastermind" and are just not engaging enough for me as a reader, as they are presented. There are also some rather jarring shifts in tense, as chapters move between past and present tense.

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Nocturne With Gaslamps by Matthew Francis is out now from Neem Tree Press.

I was given a review copy in exchange for this honest review and participation in this The Write Reads blog tour.