VICTORIAN SECRETS

By John Skow

It is no surprise that Martin Cruz Smith, author of the Soviet-era Russian cop novel Gorky Park, has written the most interesting and richly textured crime story of the season. What is unexpected about Rose (Random House; 364 pages; $25) is its setting: not the disorder of present-day Russia but the rigidly stratified society of a Welsh coal-mining town toward the end of the 19th century. As must be true in a period thriller, the setting drives the plot and makes the crime--in this case, the disappearance and presumed murder of a young and idealistic clergyman--seem inevitable. As Smith tells it, the town of Wigan is a place of impacted resentments on the part of the miners and supercilious contempt on the part of the clan that owns the mine workings, ruled by a righteous and merciless cleric, Bishop Hannay. Into this nexus of bitterness and coal dust comes Jonathan Blair, a penniless, malarial and more than slightly gin-sodden African explorer. Blair, who was born in Wigan, would rather be anywhere else, but the wealthy bishop, whose hobby is African exploration--this is the era of Burton, Speke and the Mountains of the Moon--has promised Blair a place on his next expedition if he finds the missing clergyman, who is also the fiance of the bishop's daughter.

It won't escape the notice of a modern reader that this overabundance of plot is appropriate to a Victorian novel, not merely to a tale set in Victorian times. So is the central puzzle, which involves not only the story of the naive young cleric but also the distinctly unusual relationship between snobbish Charlotte, the bishop's chilly daughter, and Rose, a lusty "pit girl," or woman miner. It should not be overlooked that Rose is the novel's title figure. Smith's ending is not quite a hanky dampener, but it does bend a hard tale of murder and mine disaster a long way toward the never-never of historical romance.

--By John Skow