The Devil's Making

The first of two 19th century detective mysteries set in lands which were to become parts of Canada.

Victoria, 1869. The ramshackle capital of British Columbia, one of the last colonies in North America, where among European, American and Chinese (known as 'Celestial') settlers vastly outnumbered by native Indians, a few thousand British try to establish the values, noble and ignoble, of what is beginning to be known as the Victorian age.

The body of a man, horribly mutilated, is discovered in the forest. This was Dr McCrory, an American 'alienist' or mad-doctor who was either an innovator in the treatment of mental illness, drawn to practice in the freedom of the colony, or a charlatan whose methods include the most dubious of pseudo-sciences: phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical 'magnetation'. Chad Hobbes, fresh from England, is the detective who must solve the crime.

But this is more than a detective story. According to Charles Darwin, the difference between the savage and the civilised person is 'the difference between a wild and a tame animal.' Is this true? Chad faces this question not only in the new territory in which he finds himself, but in himself, and in those he comes to love.

Dr Seán Haldane in his historical and contemporary crime novels draws on his experience as a neuropsychologist in health services and the criminal justice system, first in Canada (Prince Edward Island and British Columbia) then in the UK from 1990 to 2020. From 2012 to 2020 he was in private practice based in London as an expert witness, working about 2/3 with police and crown prosecution services (via the National Crime Agency), and 1/3 with defence lawyers.