Barnaby Grimes:
Legion of the Dead
Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell
David Fickling Books, 2010
Young Readers
240 pages
Barnaby Grimes is a tick-tock lad, a courier-messenger in a nameless pre-Victorian city. Barnaby is the best of the best. He’s a highstacker who uses gymnastic stunts to parkour himself across the rooftops, reaching his destination in a fraction of the time it would take any other.
The mystery opens with an assignment to take a parcel to the Gatling Quays, cobblestone alleys down among the warehouses, tenanted by gangs prepared to defend their ‘homestones’ to the death. To his surprise, Barnaby finds the apartments there deserted but for a lone woman who makes chains… for those who are buried alive.
“These days nobody wants to be buried without a finger chain, now do they?” I shook my head.
“And they knows where to find me. After all, I’m the only one left in the mansions since the hauntings began…”
Stewart has a real knack for the details of place names and visual description that make story come to life. His Barnaby Grimes books are also relatively historically accurate, (with the exception of the supernatural elements and the insanity of rooftop acrobatics.)
On the way home, Barnaby runs across a fellow tick-tock named Will Farmer, a cobblestone creeper stuck down on the ground, cornered by some ruffians from the Ratcatchers. After a bit of swordsmanship, Barnaby realizes that one of the assailants owes him a solid, getting both Will and himself out of a pickle. Turns out the “Emperor of Gatling Quays,” Firejaw O’Rourke, formerly the head of the most powerful racket in the Quays, is to be buried tomorrow. But Firejaw isn’t to rest in peace for long.
After dropping in on his old friend, Professor Pinkerton-Barnes, Barnaby is invited to help solve the mystery of innumerable fish that have begun showing up in the harbour dead with sucker-like circles on them. After he agrees, he discovers that his job will be to explore the base of Harbor Rock that very night, deep below the hulls of The Tantalus and The Ocean Lord, protected by the heavy oilskin of a Neptune suit. He was supposed to be collecting scorpion limpets. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a face-to-fin, life-or-death struggle with a sea-monster.
I found myself staring down in to the sea monster’s terrifying maw; a cavernous, dark hole surrounded by circle upon concentric circle of hooked, razor-sharp fangs.
Barnaby hacks blindly with a steel axe, but is met with a corrosive, stinging bite that sinks into his forearm. The breathing hood suddenly begins to fill with water…
The next thing he knows, on the shore of The Gatling Sump near Adelaide Graveyard, comes the sound of a tinkling bell. A finger chain bell.
Barnaby remembers coming face to face with the Emperor of the Gatling Quays that night… or was it a figment of the sea monster’s hallucinogenic venom?
For an answer, he heads for the hospital.
Its doctors had been the worst kind of sawbones; its nurses gin-soaked drabs. But that had all changed during the last war, when a new kind of nurse had emerged from the army hospitals of the East.
Within the walls of the hospital he meets the lovely and demure Lucy Partleby, who dresses his wound and catches his eye.
Later Barnaby hears the story of one Sergeant Stroyan McMurtagh of the Fighting 33rd, a band of rogues, savage fighters that led the army’s finest charges and also had a penchant for temple looting. Their commander turned a blind eye… until they raided the Temple of Kal-Ramesh, demon goddess of the dreaded Kal-Khee sect, robbing it of its great statue. They tried to make amends, but when McMurtagh and the 33rd returned the statue, it had lost its jewel third eye.
Meanwhile, the missing body of Firebeard has started a gang war, each faction calling the others a bunch of grave-robbers. Again at the hospital, (this time for Lucy, not for his arm,) which is now filled to the brim with wounded and angry gangsters, Barnaby notices a young doctor decked in ocelot fur duck out the back and feels a tingling at the back of his neck.
He follows the doctor home, (inventing a new move called the Hangman’s Bridge on the way,) only the doc doesn’t go home, he heads straight to .. you guessed it, The Gatling Quays and Adelaide Graveyard.
The night swirls into a whirlwind of fear and mystery as the lost sword of Kal-Ramesh is discovered, –a sword which can bestow the gift of life as well as death– and with it the fighting 33rd, now zombies, have returned from the East and are raising an army of the dead. Only Barnaby is in a position to save the city and return the dead to their graves.
Stewart truly captures feel of the Victorian neighborhoods and the excitement of hardcore parkour over the rooftops while cultivating fear in the gas-lit cobblestone night. Riddell’s simple black ink drawings are an amazing compliment to the story. The two are a perfect team, balancing Victorian horror and humor at the same time. All the Barnaby Grimes books are quick and easy reads that pull you into a thrilling story and make you feel for the characters despite the fast pace.
