Inspector Minahan Makes a Stand

Using verbatim accounts and quoting court reports, O'Donnell captures all the colour of a Victorian melodrama.

[Bridget O'Donnell] was a television director before she became an author and you can see her visual flair at work as she plunges us deep into a late-Victorian, fog-bound London.

A 13-year-old girl sold for a fiver, a bobby out for revenge, two sensation-mongering reporters and the scandalous sexual preferences of the upper classes – all are pivotal to Bridget O’Donnell’s Inspector Minahan Makes a Stand….  

I heard about this book from a tweet by Tom Watson MP and finished reading it yesterday. It's got everything including, sadly, topicality. It reads throughout like a well-constructed political thriller, only you know that these were real people living through real events. All the characters are richly drawn and you really get to know them -- flawed heroes and heroines, and outright villains alike. The whole thing is set against a background of Irish nationalist bombs and the not-irrelevant looming scandal around Charles Stewart Parnell. Oscar Wilde's trials were yet to come, and the revenge of the hypocritical society he depicted had not yet fallen upon him.

It's an unputdownable page-turner, right to the end. You read about the bitter political rivalries, and the hardly less bitter rivalries of the press eager to boost sales and do down the competition (and how familiar *that* sounds today). But most of all it's about how class and social inequality, along with the resultant grinding poverty in late 19th century Britain led directly to the sexual exploitation of children by a hypocritical, self-protecting elite ruling class.

We read of police corruption, harrumphing cover-ups and denials by cabinet ministers in the House of Commons with everything (personally) to lose through inquisitive journalists and a policeman like Minahan who refuses to take the local Madam's shilling (actually, sovereign): his fellow officers, compromised and worse, tell him he's a fool (before they later persecute him for his too-threatening honesty). But we also read of good people, including some journalists, and of course Inspector Minahan himself, moved and outraged by the gross injustice of the social setup.

I don't want to give anything away, so without spoilers, I'll just mention that one of the central episodes of the book is a very skilful exposition of how 'doing good' with the most honourable motivation can lead to moral ambiguity at best, complicity at worst in the very crimes whose exposure and prevention is being sought. (Even one of the best of the campaigners violates a Kantian principle of not treating people as objects or as means to an end.)

It's very rare indeed these days that a book brings tears to my eyes (and rarer still for me to confess publicly to it) but that's what happened as I reached the book's final pages. There was something deeply cathartic about it, something much deeper even than the appalling events it describes, about the human condition, about the neverending struggle between good and evil, and about how every generation seems to have to keep fighting the same old battles for justice even though the specifics change.

In the end, the good news is that the law was changed as a direct result of the heroes and heroines, not least of course the eponymous Inspector himself, but what a price they all had to pay for it. Not all the baddies thrived, though one of the worst of them ended up occupying one of the great offices of state. But there was little personal joy for the individual Quakers and other social reformers.

One of the pleasures of the book, incidentally, concerns the parallels O'Donnell frequently draws between the real events of the times and the fiction and drama of the day. She shows how Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde novella relates in detail to some of the events in London, and parallels are drawn with some of Henry James' contemporary work, as well as with two of Shaw's plays -- Mrs Warren's Profession and Pygmalion. (The Mrs W of the former has a striking similarity to the principal Madam of this book, and Prof Higgins has rather too many similarities to one of the good journalists in the book for comfort: moral ambiguity again.)

I don't usually like saying that a book would "make a good" this or that: a book is a book, and a really good one like O'Donnell's is a great and potentially life-changing one, but "Inspector Minahan Makes a Stand" would make a terrific play -- and probably a terrific film too. But don't wait for the movie -- read the book! You'll love it.

This is a real feat by author, Bridget O'Donnell, who has managed to tell a factual, historical story, in such an evocative, interesting way that it becomes a page-turning yarn. It is at once a shocking and inquiring piece of historical research and a character study of Minahan, the fascinating Irish inspector of the title. I found myself gasping out loud at some of the revelations about major political and aristocratic characters from the past, and fuming at the social injustices of the era. Of course, many of the issues in the book, such as child trafficking, are very much in the press today, and this makes the story all the more relevant; but some of the laws governing the sex trade have greatly improved, (for example the age of consent was raised to 16 largely as a result of Minahan's campaign) so there has been progress. Many of the characters that feature here are quite Dickensian and it's all the more compelling when one knows that they are real people. Even the dialogue is all documented and researched: This works very well and must have taken an amazing amount of research. O'Donnell has an excellent ability to bring events to life evocatively, often through simile and metaphor. She also speculates convincingly on some intriguing links between the events of the story and several famous pieces of Victorian literature. Thus the book takes us through politics, squalor, drama and tragedy and also manages to be historically revelatory. I finished it with a lot more insight into London's past than I had before. I have never read anything quite like this before and I think it is a great success that I can thoroughly recommend.

Using verbatim accounts and quoting court reports, O'Donnell captures all the colour of a Victorian melodrama.

[Bridget O'Donnell] was a television director before she became an author and you can see her visual flair at work as she plunges us deep into a late-Victorian, fog-bound London.

A 13-year-old girl sold for a fiver, a bobby out for revenge, two sensation-mongering reporters and the scandalous sexual preferences of the upper classes – all are pivotal to Bridget O’Donnell’s Inspector Minahan Makes a Stand….  

I heard about this book from a tweet by Tom Watson MP and finished reading it yesterday. It's got everything including, sadly, topicality. It reads throughout like a well-constructed political thriller, only you know that these were real people living through real events. All the characters are richly drawn and you really get to know them -- flawed heroes and heroines, and outright villains alike. The whole thing is set against a background of Irish nationalist bombs and the not-irrelevant looming scandal around Charles Stewart Parnell. Oscar Wilde's trials were yet to come, and the revenge of the hypocritical society he depicted had not yet fallen upon him.

It's an unputdownable page-turner, right to the end. You read about the bitter political rivalries, and the hardly less bitter rivalries of the press eager to boost sales and do down the competition (and how familiar *that* sounds today). But most of all it's about how class and social inequality, along with the resultant grinding poverty in late 19th century Britain led directly to the sexual exploitation of children by a hypocritical, self-protecting elite ruling class.

We read of police corruption, harrumphing cover-ups and denials by cabinet ministers in the House of Commons with everything (personally) to lose through inquisitive journalists and a policeman like Minahan who refuses to take the local Madam's shilling (actually, sovereign): his fellow officers, compromised and worse, tell him he's a fool (before they later persecute him for his too-threatening honesty). But we also read of good people, including some journalists, and of course Inspector Minahan himself, moved and outraged by the gross injustice of the social setup.

I don't want to give anything away, so without spoilers, I'll just mention that one of the central episodes of the book is a very skilful exposition of how 'doing good' with the most honourable motivation can lead to moral ambiguity at best, complicity at worst in the very crimes whose exposure and prevention is being sought. (Even one of the best of the campaigners violates a Kantian principle of not treating people as objects or as means to an end.)

It's very rare indeed these days that a book brings tears to my eyes (and rarer still for me to confess publicly to it) but that's what happened as I reached the book's final pages. There was something deeply cathartic about it, something much deeper even than the appalling events it describes, about the human condition, about the neverending struggle between good and evil, and about how every generation seems to have to keep fighting the same old battles for justice even though the specifics change.

In the end, the good news is that the law was changed as a direct result of the heroes and heroines, not least of course the eponymous Inspector himself, but what a price they all had to pay for it. Not all the baddies thrived, though one of the worst of them ended up occupying one of the great offices of state. But there was little personal joy for the individual Quakers and other social reformers.

One of the pleasures of the book, incidentally, concerns the parallels O'Donnell frequently draws between the real events of the times and the fiction and drama of the day. She shows how Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde novella relates in detail to some of the events in London, and parallels are drawn with some of Henry James' contemporary work, as well as with two of Shaw's plays -- Mrs Warren's Profession and Pygmalion. (The Mrs W of the former has a striking similarity to the principal Madam of this book, and Prof Higgins has rather too many similarities to one of the good journalists in the book for comfort: moral ambiguity again.)

I don't usually like saying that a book would "make a good" this or that: a book is a book, and a really good one like O'Donnell's is a great and potentially life-changing one, but "Inspector Minahan Makes a Stand" would make a terrific play -- and probably a terrific film too. But don't wait for the movie -- read the book! You'll love it.

This is a real feat by author, Bridget O'Donnell, who has managed to tell a factual, historical story, in such an evocative, interesting way that it becomes a page-turning yarn. It is at once a shocking and inquiring piece of historical research and a character study of Minahan, the fascinating Irish inspector of the title. I found myself gasping out loud at some of the revelations about major political and aristocratic characters from the past, and fuming at the social injustices of the era. Of course, many of the issues in the book, such as child trafficking, are very much in the press today, and this makes the story all the more relevant; but some of the laws governing the sex trade have greatly improved, (for example the age of consent was raised to 16 largely as a result of Minahan's campaign) so there has been progress. Many of the characters that feature here are quite Dickensian and it's all the more compelling when one knows that they are real people. Even the dialogue is all documented and researched: This works very well and must have taken an amazing amount of research. O'Donnell has an excellent ability to bring events to life evocatively, often through simile and metaphor. She also speculates convincingly on some intriguing links between the events of the story and several famous pieces of Victorian literature. Thus the book takes us through politics, squalor, drama and tragedy and also manages to be historically revelatory. I finished it with a lot more insight into London's past than I had before. I have never read anything quite like this before and I think it is a great success that I can thoroughly recommend.