What do you think?
Rate this book
Edmund Whitty #2
White Stone Day
"I mark this day most especially with a White Stone."
---Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll
Edmund Whitty, a London newspaper correspondent who can usually be counted upon for crisp and lurid copy, has fallen upon lean times. After his triumphant exposé of a notorious serial killer, he has inexplicably lost his knack for sensational reporting. Broke and desperate, he seizes upon a generous offer from a mysterious American to discredit a quack psychic. But how, he ends up wondering uneasily, does the psychic know so much about a scandal involving Whitty's late brother?
When the psychic is brutally murdered, Whitty finds himself accused of the crime and thrown into Milbank prison, the most bizarre institution of its kind in England. Help comes unexpectedly from "the Captain," a gangster not known for charity work. To save his own skin, Whitty must find the men responsible for the disappearance of the Captain's young niece, Eliza.
Whitty's search takes him to Oxford, where he meets the brilliant and eccentric Reverend William Boltbyn, a renowned children's author who delights in playing croquet, devising elaborate stories, and taking artistic photographs of little girls. There he uncovers a looking-glass world, the dark side of Victoriana, and the murder of innocence.
---Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll
Edmund Whitty, a London newspaper correspondent who can usually be counted upon for crisp and lurid copy, has fallen upon lean times. After his triumphant exposé of a notorious serial killer, he has inexplicably lost his knack for sensational reporting. Broke and desperate, he seizes upon a generous offer from a mysterious American to discredit a quack psychic. But how, he ends up wondering uneasily, does the psychic know so much about a scandal involving Whitty's late brother?
When the psychic is brutally murdered, Whitty finds himself accused of the crime and thrown into Milbank prison, the most bizarre institution of its kind in England. Help comes unexpectedly from "the Captain," a gangster not known for charity work. To save his own skin, Whitty must find the men responsible for the disappearance of the Captain's young niece, Eliza.
Whitty's search takes him to Oxford, where he meets the brilliant and eccentric Reverend William Boltbyn, a renowned children's author who delights in playing croquet, devising elaborate stories, and taking artistic photographs of little girls. There he uncovers a looking-glass world, the dark side of Victoriana, and the murder of innocence.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2005
3 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 16, 2023
The young girls’ challenge was to re-arrange the words NOR DO WE into one word!
With no small amount of national pride, I'm thrilled to report that the success that Gray achieved with his debut novel, THE FIEND IN HUMAN, continues in his second effort, WHITE STONE DAY.
Edmund Whitty is a profligate, dissolute freelance journalist who has succumbed to every known Victorian vice save womanizing - snuff, cigarettes, gin, opium, laudanum, and Acker's Chlorodine (a potent mixture of opium, marijuana and cocaine in alcohol!) Despite having achieved a measure of sensational journalistic fame and public notoriety with his coverage of Chokee Bill’s strangulation and grisly mutilation of five ladies of questionable virtue, Whitty struggles with an ongoing desperate need to produce the income required to stave off gambling debtors who won't hesitate to use a physical beating to persuade payment. In the course of searching out new "crisp copy", lurid pieces he can submit to his tight-fisted editor, he is assigned to attempt an undercover exposé of a phony psychic. What he discovers instead – a shocking, intimate and entirely compromising photograph of his brother David, a successful Oxford scholar, a brilliant photographer and an accomplished rowing athlete who drowned during a race several years earlier – puts him onto the trail of a human trafficking ring and the purveyors of that most despicable of human perversions, child pornography.
Gray’s continued mastery of atmospheric scene-building matches Anne Perry's superb, elegant atmospheric descriptions of Victorian London life and then improves on it by taking a step down into a much grittier, earthier representation of real characters living real lives. Take, for example, this single brief description of dusk in Whitechapel:
“In the shadow of London Hospital, a solitary pedestrian slouches along raven row, wearing corduroy breeches and a muffin hat. It is early evening, the temporary silence before the lamplighter arrives, that in-between hour when the day-creatures have gone to ground and the night-creatures have yet to emerge in their tattered finery. Buildings of stone and brick loom like the blackened hulks of abandoned ships as he turns up Sneer Lane, looking neither to right nor left. In East London, the unguarded pedestrian does his best to remain invisible.”
His characters, drawn from every walk in life – nobility and gentry, middle class, common working folk, military, clergy, young, old and, of course, a generous helping of criminal types – are brought to life with descriptions and unforced dialogue that places them in their place on Victorian society’s ladder with unerring, pinpoint accuracy.
If you’re a lover of historical fiction and if you enjoy, in particular, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins or the more modern efforts of authors such as Anne Perry and Charles Palliser, you’ll enjoy WHITE STONE DAY. Definitely recommended.
Paul Weiss
With no small amount of national pride, I'm thrilled to report that the success that Gray achieved with his debut novel, THE FIEND IN HUMAN, continues in his second effort, WHITE STONE DAY.
Edmund Whitty is a profligate, dissolute freelance journalist who has succumbed to every known Victorian vice save womanizing - snuff, cigarettes, gin, opium, laudanum, and Acker's Chlorodine (a potent mixture of opium, marijuana and cocaine in alcohol!) Despite having achieved a measure of sensational journalistic fame and public notoriety with his coverage of Chokee Bill’s strangulation and grisly mutilation of five ladies of questionable virtue, Whitty struggles with an ongoing desperate need to produce the income required to stave off gambling debtors who won't hesitate to use a physical beating to persuade payment. In the course of searching out new "crisp copy", lurid pieces he can submit to his tight-fisted editor, he is assigned to attempt an undercover exposé of a phony psychic. What he discovers instead – a shocking, intimate and entirely compromising photograph of his brother David, a successful Oxford scholar, a brilliant photographer and an accomplished rowing athlete who drowned during a race several years earlier – puts him onto the trail of a human trafficking ring and the purveyors of that most despicable of human perversions, child pornography.
Gray’s continued mastery of atmospheric scene-building matches Anne Perry's superb, elegant atmospheric descriptions of Victorian London life and then improves on it by taking a step down into a much grittier, earthier representation of real characters living real lives. Take, for example, this single brief description of dusk in Whitechapel:
“In the shadow of London Hospital, a solitary pedestrian slouches along raven row, wearing corduroy breeches and a muffin hat. It is early evening, the temporary silence before the lamplighter arrives, that in-between hour when the day-creatures have gone to ground and the night-creatures have yet to emerge in their tattered finery. Buildings of stone and brick loom like the blackened hulks of abandoned ships as he turns up Sneer Lane, looking neither to right nor left. In East London, the unguarded pedestrian does his best to remain invisible.”
His characters, drawn from every walk in life – nobility and gentry, middle class, common working folk, military, clergy, young, old and, of course, a generous helping of criminal types – are brought to life with descriptions and unforced dialogue that places them in their place on Victorian society’s ladder with unerring, pinpoint accuracy.
If you’re a lover of historical fiction and if you enjoy, in particular, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins or the more modern efforts of authors such as Anne Perry and Charles Palliser, you’ll enjoy WHITE STONE DAY. Definitely recommended.
Paul Weiss
February 25, 2016
If you favor Victorian thrillers, White Stone Day, by John MacLachian Gray is a perfect one: believable historic setting, endearing but flawed protagonist, numerous, fiendish predators and spunky, innocent young girls. Oblique references to Alice, Wonderland and Lewis Carroll aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson abound. The writing is superb and the plot engrossing. Although this is the second Edmund Whitty, correspondent book it can stand alone; I thoroughly enjoyed it without even knowing the first existed.
February 12, 2008
My hat's off to this author. The first book was okay, but this one was really good. Characters are good (sometimes comic in the midst of the suspense), well drawn; dialogue is really awesome, and the story itself is intriguing and will definitely hold your interest. I hope Mr. Gray wants to write a third in this series; I'll definitely be waiting. Would I recommend it? You bet. If you like thriller-type stories set in Victorian England, you'll like this one.
here's a brief peek with no spoilers:
Edmund Whitty, correspondent with the newspaper The Falcon, has picked up a new habit of relaxing in the Turkish baths. As he's sitting there one day, an American comes up to him and offers him some money to do a job for him. It seems that there is a "spiritualist" who engages in quackery and rips people off and the man (who works for the Pinkerton agency) wants Whitty to get evidence that will discredit this guy. So off Whitty goes to attend a seance held by the con man. He knows it's fake, but he has a moment of doubt when he hears a voice claiming to be his dead brother David saying that he didn't die the way everyone thought he did. This gets Whitty thinking, and a series of events that take place following the seance sets him off on an extraordinary adventure, which leads to the exposure of some of the seamier currents running below Victorian society's surface. A fun book, and a good element of suspense that will keep you turning the pages to see how things turn out. Don't be surprised if one of the main characters reminds you of Lewis Carroll...the author intended it to be so.
I try to read any fiction which involves Victorian-era spiritualism, and I'd recommend this book to people who may be of the same mind. Also, if you are going to read this one, please start with book #1 so you're not lost character wise.
Fun book for those who like Victorian settings in their mysteries.
read: 12/07/2006
here's a brief peek with no spoilers:
Edmund Whitty, correspondent with the newspaper The Falcon, has picked up a new habit of relaxing in the Turkish baths. As he's sitting there one day, an American comes up to him and offers him some money to do a job for him. It seems that there is a "spiritualist" who engages in quackery and rips people off and the man (who works for the Pinkerton agency) wants Whitty to get evidence that will discredit this guy. So off Whitty goes to attend a seance held by the con man. He knows it's fake, but he has a moment of doubt when he hears a voice claiming to be his dead brother David saying that he didn't die the way everyone thought he did. This gets Whitty thinking, and a series of events that take place following the seance sets him off on an extraordinary adventure, which leads to the exposure of some of the seamier currents running below Victorian society's surface. A fun book, and a good element of suspense that will keep you turning the pages to see how things turn out. Don't be surprised if one of the main characters reminds you of Lewis Carroll...the author intended it to be so.
I try to read any fiction which involves Victorian-era spiritualism, and I'd recommend this book to people who may be of the same mind. Also, if you are going to read this one, please start with book #1 so you're not lost character wise.
Fun book for those who like Victorian settings in their mysteries.
read: 12/07/2006
January 10, 2013
I love Victorian fiction and I enjoy crime thrillers, so I thought this would be right up my alley...but I just couldn't get into it. The writing style just didn't appeal to me after I read a couple of chapters and skimmed a few more. Oh, well...
November 9, 2012
If the highest praise you can give a book is that it leaves you wanting to read more, then White Stone Day deserves top accolades. It has just about everything you need in a novel: a gripping plot, a strong sense of time and place that nonetheless doesn't overwhelm the proceedings, a sure narrative drive, a diverse and well-drawn supporting cast of characters, and perhaps most important, an intriguing and entertaining protagonist.
White Stone Day would have been a very good book with any other main character; with cynical, dissolute, at times hapless Edmund Whitty as the protagonist, it's a great book--perhaps even more satisfying than The Fiend in Human, to which this book is a sequel.
White Stone Day would have been a very good book with any other main character; with cynical, dissolute, at times hapless Edmund Whitty as the protagonist, it's a great book--perhaps even more satisfying than The Fiend in Human, to which this book is a sequel.
July 19, 2020
Not very well written. The plot/mystery didn’t really start until about halfway through the novel, any semblance of true conflict resolved itself before it could develop, and the ending was altogether predictable.
February 15, 2010
Edmund Whitty, correspondent for the Victorian-era newspaper The Falcon, has fallen on hard times. Thanks to a mole in his office, all his story ideas are being stolen out from under him, many ending up published by his arch-rival, the journalist Fraser of Dodd's. This inability to sell a story has left Mr. Whitty in rather desperate straits and thus in no position to turn down an offer from a mysterious American gentleman he meets in a public bath.
This meeting is just the start of Whitty's adventures, which twist and turn through many of the less picturesque aspects of Victorian England, including ratting dens, "model" 19th century prisons, an assortment of drinking establishments and the simultaneous rise of the art of photography and the business of pornography.
Strangely enough, as the book came to an end I was reminded very strongly of the 1946 Bogart/Bacall movie The Big Sleep. Like White Stone Day it is full of terrific atmosphere, witty dialogue, and endless action. Also like Gray's book, the plot of The Big Sleep manages to be confusing even to someone paying close attention. (In fact, there is a story that when Chandler - author of The Big Sleep - was asked to explain who had killed the chauffeur in his story he responded that he had no idea). In both cases however, the plot is incidental to the enjoyment of the story and the occasional inconsistency or unanswered question is made almost irrelevant by the enjoyment of the story as a whole.
This meeting is just the start of Whitty's adventures, which twist and turn through many of the less picturesque aspects of Victorian England, including ratting dens, "model" 19th century prisons, an assortment of drinking establishments and the simultaneous rise of the art of photography and the business of pornography.
Strangely enough, as the book came to an end I was reminded very strongly of the 1946 Bogart/Bacall movie The Big Sleep. Like White Stone Day it is full of terrific atmosphere, witty dialogue, and endless action. Also like Gray's book, the plot of The Big Sleep manages to be confusing even to someone paying close attention. (In fact, there is a story that when Chandler - author of The Big Sleep - was asked to explain who had killed the chauffeur in his story he responded that he had no idea). In both cases however, the plot is incidental to the enjoyment of the story and the occasional inconsistency or unanswered question is made almost irrelevant by the enjoyment of the story as a whole.
August 5, 2010
A great book. I preferred it to John MacLachlan Gray's first novel ''The Fiend Inhuman'. It felt as though Gray was more focused on plotting this time through (Fiend tended to wander) while his characters engaged more than the previous book, particularly the CS Lewis 'inspired' Rev. Boltbyn, his young charges Emma and Lydia and of course the dapper journalist Edmund Whitty with his proclivities for drink and medicinal snuff. Gray's greatest strength is his skill in evoking an unromantic version of Victorian London, his ear for sparkling dialogue and his dark sense of humor (particularly when told told through Whitty's eyes). I have plans to recommend this book to a great many people and will absolutely track down his other novels to add to my 'to read' list.
July 8, 2010
"The murder of innocence," the dark side of Victoriana, a detailed parallel with the bizarre life of Lewis Carol -- this would be a near perfect book, if it had not been written in present tense. I understand the device as a way of letting us poor readers "see" the story as it unfolds, like a drama or a film, as if we were right there with it happening all around us as we read. But too many times, it just becomes awkward. I even get my tenses muddled just talking about this book.
But I loved it nonetheless. It's a strage quirky story reflective of strange quirky institutions in a most bizarre time and place -- all with the mask of innocence and purity. Real shivers.
But I loved it nonetheless. It's a strage quirky story reflective of strange quirky institutions in a most bizarre time and place -- all with the mask of innocence and purity. Real shivers.
June 22, 2011
The first book in this short series, The Fiend in Human, was very much in the style of the old penny-dreadfuls. It was great fun but I found I preferred this novel as Gray moves into darker, more Gothic territory.
Despite a relatively short length, there is a labyrinthine plot that unfolds between London and Oxfordshire.
Despite a relatively short length, there is a labyrinthine plot that unfolds between London and Oxfordshire.
November 30, 2008
As recommended many months ago by William Gibson on his blog. Dark, Victorian and Delicious...
May 7, 2009
Just finished this book. It is incredibly well written and the pace is great. I was a bit worried about the plot as it deals with child pornography, but it is well handled and not at all offensive.
October 23, 2009
Key historical figure is Roger Bacon and his coded book of science and nature secrets
September 29, 2013
wasn't bad and plot seemed okay, but not my style somehow.
March 17, 2014
3.5 stars. Review to follow.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews