The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Mystery & Detective › General
ISBN: 087113831X / Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr, November 2001
Hired to write a biography of J.M.W. Turner, England's great Romantic landscape artist, Walter Hartright discovers a "dark clue" embedded in the artist's clever paintings and becomes obsessed with recreating the enigmatic artist's true existence.
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This is a book begun, but not finished. I could not finish it. Many times, I have come close to destroying it, thinking I should have no rest while it remained to reproach me. I could not bring myself to do it. I have therefore given instructions that it should be sealed in a box, which is to remain unopened until I, my wife Laura, our sister Marian Halcombe and all our children are dead.So begins James Wilson's brilliant recreation of the Victorian suspense novel, as the characters from Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White - Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe - are involved in another dramatic and dangerous investigation, this time emanating from the heart of respectable London society.Walter is commissioned to write a biography of the greatest of English painters, JMW Turner, but soon finds Turner is a disturbingly elusive figure - shy, secretive, and the subject of startling rumours and counter-rumours. Who is telling lies about him - his fellow artists, his patrons, the women in the bawdy houses and inns he frequented, the engravers and critics who knew him and his work? Whose interests are served by vilifying a dead genius? How can we know the whole truth about a life?Walter and Marian's detective work leads them into the darkness at the heart of Turner's world, forcing them to confront a mystery which threatens their sanity, their trust in each other, and their lives.
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