The Devil's Making
A Mystery
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award (formerly the Arthur Ellis Award) for Best Novel
In the ramshackle capital of one of the last colonies in North America, a few thousand settlers aspire to the values of the Victorian age while coexisting beside a population of native Indians that vastly outnumbers them. Their cautious peace is challenged when a body is discovered: Dr. McCrory, an American alienist whose methods included phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical magnetation.
Chad Hobbes, recently arrived from England, is the policeman who must solve the crime. At first it seems the murderer was an Indian medicine man who has already been arrested. It would be easy for Hobbes to let him swing for the murder, but his own interest in an Indian woman from the same tribe causes him to look at the case in more detail. And once he does, he discovers that everyone who knew McCrory seems to have something to hide.
Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, Sean Haldane's The Devil's Making portrays a frontier where cultures clashed on the eve of a new country's birth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet, publisher, and psychologist Haldane (Emotional First Aid) makes his fiction debut with an exceptional historical set on Vancouver Island, with this winner of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. In 1868, Chad Hobbes, trained as a lawyer in England, arrives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he can find work only as a police constable. When Dr. Richard McCrory, an unorthodox American "alienist," is brutally murdered, circumstantial evidence points to Wiladzap, the chief of a small trading band of Tsimshian Indians. After Wiladzap's arrest, prejudices and misconceptions hinder Hobbes's attempts to sort out the truth in a land where mores are changing rapidly and social ferment is breaking down class distinctions. Against a background of the emerging theories of Charles Darwin, to whom the constable writes for advice, Hobbes must carefully consider who are the "savages" and who are the "civilized." A host of intriguing characters combine with Haldane's firm grasp of the period to make this an enthralling read.
Customer Reviews
A pleasant sojourn into history--read it!
I knew I’d be writing a review by the middle of THE DEVIL’S MAKING by Sean Haldane because it’s a fascinating story. Sadly the moment passed when I could write knowledgeably about the story, but I’m unwilling to let it go. Everyone should read this book!
THE DEVIL’S MAKING won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel (2014).
The book opens in 1868 when Chad Hobbs travels from Britain to the tiny outpost of Victoria, capital of British Columbia. The trip takes four months because they must travel around Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. This is but one of the many “oddities” of life in the late 19th century and it doesn’t take long for the reader to feel like they belong to those rough and muddy times.
Chad becomes a policeman who must solve the murder of a local man. Naturally the townsfolk are quick to blame a native Indian and incarcerate him, but Chad is unwilling to accept such a “desirable” outcome without more facts.
One of the story’s joys is Chad’s philosophical understanding of what he discovers and what this means about life. Although I’ve never been much interested in history, I found this book delightful.