The Devil's Making: A Victorian Detective Mystery - Softcover

Victoria, 1869. The ramshackle capital of British Columbia, the last colony in North America. Vastly outnumbered by native Indians , a few thousand British, American, European, and Chinese settlers aspire to the values of the Victorian age. In the forest a mutilated body is discovered: Dr McCrory, an American alienist whose methods include phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical magnetation . Chad Hobbes, arrived from England, is the policeman who must solve the crime. Could the murderer be a Tsimshian medicine man, Wiladzap, who is immediately arrested? But everyone who has known McCrory respectable or not has something to hide. This is a detective mystery and more. Victoria s inhabitants find themselves in a Garden of Eden but have to face the savagery which they readily see in the Indians but also exists in themselves. Darwin wrote that the difference between the savage and the civilised person is the difference between a wild and a tame animal. Is this true? Chad faces the question not only in the new territory in which he finds himself, but in himself and in those he comes to love.

Seán Haldane was born in England in 1943, he grew up in Northern Ireland, and in 1967 moved to Canada where he lived until 1994 in Quebec, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island. He now lives in London, England. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and at University College Oxford where he obtained First Class Honours in English Language and Literature. Subsequently he completed a PhD in Psychology at Saybrook Institute (now Saybrook University), San Franciso, and trained and became licensed in Clinical Psychology. He has worked as a psychologist and neuropsychologist, mainly in memory clinics, in Canada and in the UK, most recently as Head of Neuropsychology in the NHS in East London. He is best known as a publisher (The Ladysmith Press, Quebec, 1968-1974), a writer of psychology books (Emotional First Aid, Couple Dynamics) and literary studies (Donne, Hardy), and as a poet: his first published volume was in 1968, and his most recent is Always Two: Collected Poems 1966-2009. The Devil s Making is Seán Haldane s first published novel.