Gore on the high seas

The Empress Murders is a new novel by a talented young actor, Toby Schmitz

Toby Schmitz is an actor and writer. His new novel is The Empress Murders, a locked-room drama set aboard a passenger ship.

More than a decade ago, actor and playwright Toby Schmitz wrote a play called Empire: Terror on the High Seas about a murder spree on board an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. It was set in 1924, the year of the British Empire Exhibition in London, where one of the most popular features was an exhibit called Races in Residence designed to show off the conquered peoples of the empire. One theatre reviewer noted that the “fall of the victims mirrors the tumbling of the British Empire in the mid 20th century” while speculating that the dense and incident-packed play might work better as a novel.

Schmitz appears to have taken the suggestion on board, turning his play into a novel and renaming it The Empress Murders (after the ocean liner, Empress of Australia). The new title is a nod in the direction of Agatha Christie but readers expecting to snuggle up with a bit of Miss Marple-style cosy crime will be in for a shock.

The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz

The Empress Murders is a violent book: nobody here is dispatched with a nip of arsenic in their camomile tea. Victims are flayed, mutilated, eviscerated and impaled. The bumbling ship’s detective, Inspector Archie Daniels, is up to his copper’s ears in gore.

Daniels suspects the killer might be the so-called London Bleeder, who has been committing gruesome murders all over Greater London, 26 bodies at last count. “Sometimes a clean kill, strangled, slit, poisoned, sometimes an abhorrent mutilation or perversion. Sometimes a mocking message left, sometimes nothing but maggots already at play”. Coded telegrams from his boss at Scotland Yard advise “no Bleeder activity in London since embarkation”, confirming the inspector’s hypothesis that the Bleeder is on board the Empress. But is he a passenger or a member of the crew?

Most of the action takes place in first class, and the author holds little back in depicting the malignant racism, boorish manners and entitled indolence of the toffs as they drink and screw their way across the Atlantic. Schmitz has certainly done his homework in the fashion mags of the day: “Nicole Hertz-­Hollingsworth … skips over in patent Mary Janes, periwinkle argyle socks, purple heritage tartan knickerbockers, a champagne silk blouse with black satin bow (top button popped).” Tony, her repellent – and cuckolded - husband of three weeks, is in “sapphire velvet sports coat with plum silk pocket square and matching tie (top button popped), white trousers knife-pleated, two-tone wing-tips”.

Does the story need this intricate sartorial detail? Probably not, but Schmitz’s careful cataloguing of upper-class white privilege steers us towards the novel’s central themes of racism and class warfare. His inventories of wardrobes and jewellery boxes mimic the mental inventories drawn up by members of the ship’s crew as they plot to separate the toffs from their valuables.

Toby Schmitz is an actor as well as a screenwriter. He appeared in the Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe

As an actor, Schmitz has appeared in Tom Stoppard’s ultra-clever play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and there is more than a whiff of Stoppard’s ingenious word-games in The Empress Murders, and of his verbosity:

Tony’s great-grandfather was what we now call a Piccadilly Johnny, an Englishman who set out to do and be, with virility. He flipped a coin, it chose Africa. Before being stashed in sediment by a crocodile, this great-grandfather, with the help of a Prussian missionary’s wife, sired a daughter, who was subsequently motivated … by a rangy adventurer Dutchman Oskar Herz, to come with him to newly formed German East Africa … Here they bred a solitary, leonine son Gabby (Tony’s father). When Oskar Herz (Tony’s grandfather, if you’re still following, and it’s fine if you’re not) hallucinated to malarial death.

Some readers might find themselves skipping over such passages, overstuffed as they are with background detail, and by the author’s own admission they won’t miss much by doing so. The novel itself sometimes feels overstuffed, with superfluous characters as well as words, but once the murders start happening it doesn’t take Schmitz long to whittle down his cast to a more manageable size.

If the lurid violence of the murders functions, at one level, as an analogy of the violence of empire, it also mirrors the violence of the First World War, from which nearly all the book’s characters emerge damaged, either by having taken part in it or, in some cases, by having missed it.

The war scenes contain some of the novel’s most graphic and visceral prose, the overwriting validated by the atrocity of the subject:

First thing he remembers after coming to is idly picking someone’s complete eyeball and stalk off his putties, wrapped around his calf like a baby octopus. They were in a moving cathedral of black cloud, the stained-glass windows were orange, yellow, red and went for miles … John Rowling put his hand into a vile ribcage soup in order to stand and admire this turbid architecture, when another crump hit him, felt the hum before impact.

Somehow Schmitz manages to hold the novel’s disparate elements together, skewering a world debauched by wealth and war and empire while keeping the reader guessing about the outcome of his nautical murder mystery.

Even a few short chapters narrated in the voice of the ocean liner make a crazy kind of sense as the first-class passengers guzzle gin and squabble about Dada in the ship’s cocktail lounge. (Tom Stoppard’s parody of Dadaism, Travesties, is another of Schmitz’s acting credits.)

The penultimate chapters are suitably cataclysmic, like a Jacobean tragedy in which the stage ends up covered with corpses. By the end the novel had won me over, Schmitz’s clever but sometimes show-offy prose giving way to something quieter as two Irish lighthousekeepers ponder the final telegram messages sent by the Empress of Australia.

It’s a book that will leave you thinking.

Tom Gilling is an author and critic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toby Schmitz is a writer, director and actor. He was most recently seen on television in Boy Swallows Universe and on stage in Gaslight. He has received nominations for his performances in The Seagull, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. His television credits include The Twelve and Black Sails. He is also a celebrated playwright. His plays include Degenerate Art, I Want to Sleep With Tom Stoppard and Capture the Flag. He was awarded the Patrick White Award for his play Lucky.