The Yard by Alex Grecian

Alex Grecian’s first novel, The Yard, set in the 1889 in a Victorian London coming on the back of the horrors of Jack the Ripper’s atrocities on the city, is a lurid grisly historical thriller/crime novel. Set in the seedy underbelly of the most populous city at that time in the world, featuring a deranged killer who is butchering the policemen themselves, the Yard introduces us to the Murder Squad, a set of policemen tasked with investigating the most difficult murder cases that pile up in this city, especially with “Saucy Jack” having unshackled the chains off a deranged set of killers. The Yard takes us to the unexplored dark alleyways of London, featuring a trio of policemen – Inspector Walter Day, backed up by the ever-resourceful constable Hammersmith and aided by the progressive thinking pathologist Dr. Bernard Kingsley who is out to clean up London’s morgues and also the doctor society at large of primitive practices.

The story starts off with the discovery of a trunk, stuffed with the cut-up body parts of a policeman, left to be found in a busy train station. That triggers off an investigation led by Inspector Day, a newbie to the city of London and also newly promoted to the role of an inspector. But the grisly clues lead Day and his men to uncovering a series of deaths, perhaps related or not. The Murder Squad are even further baffled by the murder weapon, a pair of shears used by this deranged killer who stabs his murder victims (‘policemen’) in fits of anger and then sews up their eyes and mouth and dismembers their bodies to stuff into trunks. Meanwhile, Hammersmith, still dealing with the demons of his own childhood, discovers another body, this of a young boy left to die stuck inside a chimney. And then there are others, victims to a killer named as the “Beard Killer”, who targets bearded men in the London streets. Yeah, it's a cess-pool alright, London is a city where the value of human life is pitiful and rather minuscule.  

Like a lot of other crime-thrillers set in the Victorian London era, Alex plays on the Jack the Ripper narrative skillfully weaving that into his own plots. There’s always the shadow of the “saucy jack” whom the police never apprehended or identified. Alex takes multiple POVs throughout the story, fleshing out the sub-plots that span across different threads, even giving us an insight into the main killer, the Bald Man, as he frets about his failed life and relationships. Alex drums up a disturbing atmospheric vision of the London in the late nineteenth century. The graphic imagery of the poverty that lays heavy (stale old tea that tastes of copper anyone!), the incessant glum rains, the grimy warrens of tunnels that run underneath the city, the helplessness of the police duty bound to protect a society that hates them, the prostitutes stricken with terror by fleeting shadows and the scepter of Jack the Ripper looming large over their livelihood, the steady clip-clop of hansom cabs that ply the gloom – all of it really levels up the sense of doom that pervades the city of London.

The Yard is the first in a series of many, where Alex Grecian gleefully plays out lurid tales of murder and mayhem in this gloomy city of London. A historical crime-thriller that is ultimately a guilty pleasure to read, paced like a breakneck hansom cab that cares little for the shadows hanging heavy across the roads or the hapless pedestrians. Highly recommended! I will be picking up the rest in the series for sure.