A Necessary Murder – MJ Tjia

What do you get if you cross a female Sherlock Holmes with Hercule Poirot, and add a dash of Erast Fandorin?
Intrepid sleuth and high-class courtesan Heloise Chancey returns to her adventures in A Necessary Murder (Pantera Press 2018), the second novel in this mystery series by MJ Tjia.
In the first book, She Be Damned, we were introduced to Heloise and her circle of friends, acquaintances, associates and clients as she became embroiled in some particularly vicious crimes. A Necessary Murder takes up where the first book finished, and opens with a similarly violent death: a local servant finds young Margaret Lovejoy brutally murdered in the outhouse. The child’s death causes an outcry, but it is only the beginning. A few days later, a man is killed in the same way – his throat sliced open – on Heloise Chancey’s doorstep as she entertains her guests. As the days pass, the body count gets higher, and Heloise is drawn once again into the world of dark appetites and criminal minds as she undertakes her duties as an unofficial but professional detective and police consultant. And once again, her primary career – as an expensive and sought-after courtesan – threatens to be sullied by her involvement in the murky malevolence of murder.
But Heloise cannot help her nature and cannot seem to avoid being drawn into the evil goings-on happening literally right on her own doorstep. I previously described Heloise as a capable, determined, thoroughly likeable and delightfully naughty character, and this continues to be an apt description. She is cheeky, playful and imaginative, with a quick wit and heightened sensibilities. She is also clever and cunning, daring and forthright. She can be petulant and coy, but she can also be generous, loving and sincere. As she assists Inspector Hatch in dealing with the terrible crimes, while trying to maintain the safety and security of her friends, she uses her bright intellect and her sharp mind to piece together the clues that present themselves. With a surfeit both of victims and of suspects, and with the reader never knowing who will be next on either list, Heloise races headfirst into trouble, using her womanly wiles and her persistent and perceptive personality to unearth the killer. There is a large cast of characters – almost too many sometimes, to keep track of – but each of them is drawn with care, even the most minor players.
In this second novel, we are given further insight not only into Heloise’s life, but also the life of her maid, Amah Li Leen. In fact, Amah’s voice plays a distinct and major role in this book, and we are treated to much more of her backstory. MJ Tjia has a masterful ability to sketch out the lives of these characters. She reveals only as much of their history as is necessary for the story in hand, and yet as readers we infer that there is so much more yet to be discovered. Every so often she will mention a small detail, or make reference to some historical incident, cementing the feeling that the lives of Heloise and Amah and their household of servants are a complex matrix, and that we are only just beginning to skim the surface. This is a writer who knows how to hold back, how to suggest the edges of a mystery without succumbing to the temptation to tell everything at once. She shows great restraint, allowing the narrative to unfold at its own pace. By the end of the book, we feel we have read a complete story (like any good crime novel, the crime has been solved and there is a satisfying resolution), and yet we also feel immersed in some greater journey, as we wonder about the threads of Heloise’s life which are not tied neatly but are still loose; we imagine where those threads might lead if we were only to tease them out a little more.
I have no doubt that there will be a third book in this series, and there are enough clues and sinister secrets in the first two books to imagine that the next will be just as engrossing. MJ Tjia was recently shortlisted (under her real name Mirandi Stanton) for the Stella Prize for her literary novella The Fish Girl, and although these Heloise Chancey novels are very different in tone, genre and style, what they have in common is great writing anchored in time and place by an abundance of particular details and sensations that construct authenticity and believability.
Heloise Chancey may be a fictional character living her life in London in the mid 1800’s, but she is very much a woman for our times. As a courtesan she is accomplished, admired, professional, discrete and charming; as a sleuth she is strong-willed, resolute, proficient, inventive and decisive. She carries out her duties with a spirited sense of fun and a sassy and mischievous impudence. She may be trapped in the voluminous skirts and the misogynist attitudes of 200 years ago, but she somehow manages to transcend those limitations and to confront scandal and misdeeds in a thoroughly dogged manner whilst managing to remain ladylike and demure. Her costumes are fabulous, her presentation is neatly coiffured, and her frills and flounces remain unruffled through the most dire of circumstances. MJ Tjia combines this endearing character with the page-turning thrills of a good whodunnit, and surprises us every so often with a visceral, cocky or risqué detail. This rollicking read is wrapped up in the smells and sounds of urban Victorian English life, intricately woven with all the colour and flavour of the East, the added complexity of Asian influence fuelled by MJ Tjia’s own heritage.