Blog tour: Dangerous by Essie Fox
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘Fiction can be fatal…
‘Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city. But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…
‘As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…’
In Dangerous, by Essie Fox, we meet Lord Byron in 1818, when he’s decamped to soggy, sleazy Venice in disgrace following the dissolution of his marriage.
Despite vague intentions to lead a quieter life now that he’s 30, Byron’s reputation proceeds him: he has a standing invitation to the literary salons of the enigmatic Countess Alfieri, and is a VIP at Veronica Lombardo’s upmarket brothel. He’s recently ended an affair with Margarita Cogni, or “La Fornarina”, the fiery wife of a baker, and fallen for Teresa, the young wife of Count Guiccioli.
What Byron isn’t, is a murderer. However, when he discovers a young woman dying outside Countess Alfieri’s palazzo, and, two days later, wakes up to find the prostitute he went to bed with expired in the night, fingers start to point, and it’s up to him to prove his innocence and determine the real culprit(s).
I really enjoyed Dangerous. Featuring real people, events, and extracts of text alongside a gripping mystery, this novel feels literary, yet highly accessible. And, as I discovered when reading the author’s note at the end, a lot of the scandalous and outlandish details are true – when it comes to Lord Byron, there are many things you don’t need to, and indeed couldn’t, make up!
Fox has clearly done her research, and it shows in her vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of nineteenth-century Venice, including The Leads, the insalubrious prison where Byron is briefly held on suspicion of murder, and the monastery island of Lazzaro, where he recovers and ponders his next move after his improbable escape. The layers of machinations Byron’s nemeses use to discredit him, and the seemingly-incidental details that turn out to be relevant to these, are sophisticated and inspired.
The author also rises well to the challenge of presenting Byron as a likeable, sympathetic character. Most people will come to the novel with the knowledge that he was a bounder and a cad, and Fox’s version of him doesn’t deny or tie himself in knots justifying this – in fact, he’s hilariously brazen – which helps you warm to him.
What’s more, though, you get to know the whole man: his difficult experiences growing up, his struggles with disability, his intellectual prowess and interests, his relationships with his friends and staff, and his (admittedly hands-off) fondness for his daughters and the animals in his menagerie. All of this makes you all the more indignant on his behalf when he’s variously accused of a) writing Polidori’s inferior novel The Vampyre; b) actually being a vampire, and a member of a depraved secret sect to boot; and c) murder.
Something else I liked about this novel was the humour that laces it, such as La Fornarina’s histrionics (including dramatically throwing herself into a canal when Byron asked her to leave his palazzo, which really happened); the grumbles of Byron’s long-suffering loyal valet, Fletcher; the barmy things Byron spends his money on, such as a life-sized, externally and internally anatomically-correct wax Venus he almost immediately decides is too creepy to display to visitors (also true); and the convoluted way he goes about exposing the real murderers.
Dangerous is dark, compelling – and a lot of fun.
