The Dark Clue

Description

The Dark Clue is 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, J. M. W. Turner, but soon finds Turner is a disturbingly elusive figure. His search takes us into Victorian England in all its staggering extremes of poverty and wealth, of slums and stately homes, of public morality and private vice, in an unforgettable tale of suspense.

James Wilson was born in Cambridge in 1948 and educated at Oxford University, where he read History. He has written plays, TV documentaries (including the award-winning 'Savagery and the American Indian' for the BBC) and a critically acclaimed history of Native Americans, The Earth Shall Weep, published by Picador and Grove/Atlantic. He is a member of the executive committee of Survival, an international organization campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples, and acts as their consultant on North American cases. In 1999 he co-wrote a Survival report, Canada's Tibet: the Killing of the Innu, which created a political storm in Canada.He lives with his wife and family in Bristol, and is currently at work on his second novel.