Like a present that needs a lot of unwrapping, Iain Pears’s new historical mystery goes back in layers from a 1953 funeral to Edwardian London, and from Paris in 1890 to, finally, Venice in 1867, where a densely plotted imbroglio contains the seed of the book’s central riddle, concerning a childless marriage and a mystery child.

The answer, in this case, is so shocking that it causes one of the world’s richest and most powerful men to fall from a window in London’s St James’s Square. It is 1909, and John Stone, Baron Ravenscliff, is an armaments manufacturer and financial tycoon. His fortune is grounded in the torpedo — an invention he stole from a man in Venice — and the knack of knowing what percentage of shares will gain control of a company. He seems to have almost everything, including an idyllic marriage to the Countess Elizabeth Hadik-Barkockzy von Futak uns Szala, and it is the grieving Countess Elizabeth who puts a journalist named Braddock on the case like a private detective (writing Stones’s biography as his “cover”) to unravel her late husband’s puzzling will.

He doesn’t get anywhere near the bottom of it, and it is only after her funeral, nearly half a century later, that a solicitor forwards a package to him. It contains the second main chunk of the story from a dead man called Henry Cort whom Braddock met in his ­inquiries. Pears has an enjoyably three-dimensional and well-­upholstered way with historical settings, and from London we go to an equally vivid Paris, where Cort soon finds himself coshed over the head on the Ile St Louis, in those days a derelict and dangerous criminal enclave.

It is in Paris that we discover the story of an orphanage girl who becomes a prostitute and then a countess. She has a flair for transformations, and we’ve already seen her leading a double existence later in London, as Jenny the East End anarchist, where she also shoots a man dead. As the story continues, we meet a blackmailing spirit medium, a hapless inventor, and a man who claims to be Casanova, now detained in an asylum at the age of 140. More than that, we learn something about torpedoes and naval artillery, we get a timely crash course in economics (Barings Bank is in difficulties and an Edwardian credit crisis threatens the world) and we are shown an almost mystic vision of the overwhelming importance of money.

Pears was a crime writer before he crossed into more literary territory with An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), and Stone’s Fall still has a distinct but not unpleasant odour of genre fiction about it, from the slickness of the title onwards. At just over 600 convoluted pages it is a pretty heavy piece of light reading, but it certainly entertains, it even informs after a fashion, and it is altogether a generous, triple-decker slab of upmarket historical hokum.Just the thing if you’re packing your Gladstone bag for the beach.

Stone's Fall by Iain Pears
Cape £18.99 pp608

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