Class Divisions Come Tumbling Down in THE TUMBLING GIRL (2023)

Originally posted April 24, 2024.

Historical fiction isn’t my typical genre wheelhouse, but my brother-in-law got me a Victorian mystery with a female lead last Christmas, and I was excited to try something new from a debut author. Bridget Walsh’s The Tumbling Girl is a gaslamp mystery set against the backdrop of a Ripper-alike dubbed the Hairpin Killer. Plots that revolve around the gruesome dismemberment of young women risk falling into voyeuristic misogyny themselves. The Tumbling Girl is fully aware of this, and Walsh incorporates the treatment of women and sex workers in Victorian England as a major theme of the plot. Successfully? Somewhat!

Minnie Ward is the writer and functional stage manager at a music hall called the Variety Palace (I’m not sure if this is intended to be the real-life Palace Theatre). Her best friend Rose Watkins is an acrobat who performs at the venue, and when she fails to show up to work, Minnie soon discovers that Rose has died in a highly suspicious “suicide”. Despite signs of resistance, the police are apathetic about investigating further due to Rose’s social status and rumours that she did sex work. Due to the time period, a verdict of suicide means that Rose cannot be interred in the churchyard, so Minnie sets out to prove that she was murdered, hiring private detective Albert Easterbrook to find out the truth.

The two leads were the highlight of the book. Albert is a consulting detective in the Holmesian vein, but unlike Holmes, he is a burly, balding pugilist with a broken nose—the kind of character you’d expect to feature as Thug #2. Despite his appearance (and boxing prowess), he’s also a gentle and mild-mannered fellow, frequently mistaken for a “toff” thanks to a stint at boarding school after his originally-working-class parents landed a windfall. He is contrasted by the shrewd Minnie, whose working class street smarts and skills as a comedian and impressionist come in handy for getting information in places where Albert arouses suspicion. Together, they form two halves of a whole Holmes, and yes, there is a romantic arc between them.

Minnie and Albert’s investigation draws the pair into a conspiracy surrounding an exclusive gentleman’s club. Much is made of the class difference between our leads, how the issue affects various relationships in their social circles, and the effect it might have on their burgeoning relationship if they end up entering one. We have impoverished lords and upwardly-mobile factory workers, music hall performers who marry into the gentry. The Variety Palace itself functions as a sort of levelling ground, where despite its scandalous reputation, the arts community is a class unto itself, where talented performers can get a leg up regardless of their background or gender (more on this in a moment.) The book also mentions the treatment of LGBT-ness/gender-nonconformity in the era (couched in period-appropriate circumlocutions), but not race, which felt like an omission—as far as I recall the only character of colour was a minor villain. That’s something I’d like to see out of future instalments in the series. These are performers, after all; as the book points out, this is a profession in which socially marginalized people can actually make out decently for themselves.

Mostly, though, The Tumbling Girl is concerned with the treatment of women in turn-of-the-century England, and the ways in which women (again, typically white women) navigate employment, work, and marriage when education and upwardly-mobile careers are denied to them. Characters are more than usually understanding that sex work is simply a mundane fact of life, and that those who do it for money still deserve respect:

John nodded. ‘I ain’t taking on Jeffers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got mouths to feed. The line is Rose Watkins offed herself, and that’s official.’

‘Well, you do what you think is best. But we both know this doesn’t smell right. And the girl was just making a living. Like you.’

It might seem an unlikely anachronism that so many people are persuaded to help investigate Rose’s death despite their Victorian social mores, but honestly, I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to compromise their beliefs about propriety if they feel sympathetic enough. And in many ways, the prospect of respectable heterosexual marriage is more precarious and dangerous to these women than prostitution.

Although it has these elements of social commentary, this is not a procedural, or adventure story, but a clued mystery, with several twists that marry its disparate plotlines as well as a surprise ending reveal. This is where the book’s themes don’t really gel for me.

The next section contains oblique S P O I L E R S

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To paraphrase Ursula K. Le Guin, the greatest sin of fiction writers is that a good story makes evil seem complex and interesting, when real-life evil is straightforward and banal. Serial killers are one example: in genre fiction, a compelling, brilliant, sympathetic villain is desirable. Meanwhile actual serial killers are overwhelmingly men and overwhelmingly white, their victims are socially marginalized groups such as women or people of colour, and the reason they are not caught by police is not typically genius but a failure to investigate. In Toronto in the 2010s, it was widely accepted gossip in the LGBT community that there was a serial killer targeting the Church and Wellesley area (a gay neighbourhood). The police publicly denied the possibility for almost eight years.[1]

Again, The Tumbling Girl knows this. The fact that the police won’t investigate Rose’s death because she’s done sex work is a key element of the plot. Which made it all the more difficult to swallow the surprise reveal of the Hairpin Killer’s identity and motivations. Narratively, the twist was clever, but in the context of the social commentary leading up to it, it felt like an uncanny valley, like we had left the world we had previously been occupying. Ditto the emphasis on the dangers that women (particularly in a time period where they couldn’t have independent finances) could face from their husbands and boyfriends, combined with multiple bait-and-switches about seemingly abusive partners.

I was left wondering what, exactly, The Tumbling Girl was trying to say about gender politics. Probably what it does say, in so many words, in the first half of the book—it’s just that the twists demanded by conventional mystery structure undermine these themes. As readers of crime fiction, we’re always hoping to be surprised, hoping that the killer is “just the last person anyone would suspect!” The satirical police procedural Deadloch (2023) had a similar take on some of these ideas, but with a reveal that I found more nuanced (despite being a genre piss-take).

Overall, The Tumbling Girl had endearing characters, a fun atmosphere, and a more-than-usually sympathetic attitude towards working-class Londoners and sex workers, even if the different elements it tackled didn’t quite come together for me. I still enjoyed it enough that I may pick up Walsh’s recently-released sequel The Innocents to see where the series goes.

[1] See Missing From the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System That Failed Toronto’s Queer Community by Justin Ling.