By Tom J. Sandy
Published by Eye 5
Essex, United Kingdom
Hdbk, 241 pgs., 2006
ISBN: 0-9546897-6-3

I must confess that serial murderers have held a certain fascination for me since my student days in Chicago when I stumbled upon a slightly used study of London’s Whitechapel murders. “Saucy Jack,” has always personified the accipitirine killer lurking in the foggy street, hidden away in a Cimmerian alcove, waiting, ever waiting, for an innocent to slaughter. My landlady at the time, who hailed from the Isle of Man and was over eighty years old, told me a delightful story of how her mother would instruct her that if she “wasn’t a good girl,” Jack-the-Ripper would “get her!” One supposes that the woman’s child-rearing methodology produced a plethora of demure and obedient offspring.

Serial murder has always been defined as a psychosis, which is the only way modernity can conceive of such behavior; contextualized within a “scientific” definition while ignoring the moral conscience. It seems to me serial murderers purposefully live outside the human condition, both mentally and spiritually, and chose to do so to facilitate a cacoethes to destroy human life.

But, whatever the cause, serial murderers have grown in number and, if memory serves and FBI statistics are correct, there are thousands of unapprehended serial murderers stalking about as I write.

Fiction writers have long held a fascination with serial killers as well and one such writer is the English novelist, Tom J. Sandy. Mr. Sandy’s training ground was Fleet Street, where journalism surely offered a rich and abundant education in human nature and one in which he has ably utilized in his career as a crime fiction novelist.

Given the unique ending Sandy employed in his earlier work, Perverting the Course of Justice (Eye 5), I looked forward to his new release, The Monopoly Murders, and was not disappointed.

Sandy’s strength is in character development and in this instance his antagonist is Detective Inspector Rory Alexander, a young and highly talented policeman given to circumspection, sneaking cigarettes, quaffing warm Guinness in London’s pubs, and dedicating his life to fighting the wages of modernity. It is the perfervid Rory whose conjuring deciphers that the killer's modus operandi is predicated on the game of Monopoly, while the English version of CSI discovers a strange and exotic poison has been administered to a few of the randomly selected victims.

Sandy’s structure and form remind one of LeCarre’ at his best; the snide and witty aside, his facile style, his ability to make the “murder room” come alive as England’s finest hunt the serial killer. Interestingly, the author introduces the protagonist half way through the story, which adds another dimension to his work that allowed an in-depth look at the killer. Sandy chose to reveal the killer’s background from the perspective of an implied, developing, psychosis, eschewing any possibility of a “diabolical” theme in which the English are so able. One does yearn for the horror fiction of an M. R. James.

Sandy, to his great credit, avoids the required, politically correct, “shagging” scene though DI Alexander, in moments of great anxiety, is given to churlish exhortations that inevitably include the “F” word. I have noticed, however, that English novelists haven’t quite picked up the proper application of the thoroughly Americanized word, totally avoiding the prefix, standardized in urban America, “mother!” While I am sympathetic regarding the author’s efforts to portray a certain machismo I do wonder; whatever happened to civitas?

Sandy has succeeded in delivering a page turning thriller that will delight crime fiction aficionados, but more importantly we are witnessing a maturing novelist who refuses to recast his earlier work but is seeking to expand and explore the dark side of human nature. Sandy has witnessed the ennui and decadence of modernity and when he juxtaposes its moral ambiguity against the verities of the Judeo-Christian worldview we will have a novelist prepared to take his place with Dean Koontz, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Graham Greene.

The Monopoly Murders is available on Amazon.com.

Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

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