The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Death in the Spires
By KJ Charles
Storm Publishing, 2024
Five stars

A beautifully-written, gripping, and rather heartbreaking story of human ruination wrapped up in a murder mystery. It was not what I expected, and far from the romantic story I initially hoped for; but in the end gave me what I needed.

Jeremy Kite, a clerk at Somerset House in London (government offices), loses his position over an anonymous letter sent to his employer accusing him of the murder of Toby Feynsham—ten years after the unsolved murder happened. As far as Jeremy is concerned, that murder ruined his life, and now it’s happening again.

What unfolds is Jeremy’s quest to solve the murder of his Oxford classmate and friend Toby Freynsham in their senior year at Oxford. More than this, the true story of that golden time in Jeremy’s life is pulled bit by bit from the shadows of his memory, and laid before the reader in all its beauty and sorrow. Jeremy will not allow himself to be emotionally crushed one more time, even at the expense of his safety.

There’s a good whisper of Agatha Christie shimmering through this book; but it’s darker and more modern in the honesty of its emotions than Christie chose to be. Those emotions, if they resonate with modern (i.e. 2024) readers, are still entirely appropriate for the setting of the book, which takes place between 1892 and 1905. It’s a very deft job, and Charles’s prose is elegant and poignant. It evokes both the beauty of Oxford in this period, and the stifling cultural rigidity of England.

The voices of the seven young people caught up in the terrible drama feel real to our ears, while also feeling very much part of a long-lost world over a century ago. The gay subtext in the plot would never have appeared at the time; but it certainly might have existed and might have affected the outcome of the story in exactly the way it does. This is the gift of books like this to readers like me: it brings forward a social history that has been mostly ignored, erased, or criminalized. Remember that E.M. Forster didn’t publish his book “Maurice” until after his death in 1971.

Woven into the complicated narrative is a pointed critique of the aristocratic world of late Victorian England. It is discreet and vivid, and nothing at all like the odious, celebratory violence that many people appreciated so much in the recent film “Saltburn.” This book would make a much better movie.

As a work of literature, this book is as good as any I’ve read in a long time. Well done.