The Gold Key
Novel reviewed by L. Cidell in June 2008
An arrogant theater critic blackballed for printing his honest opinion escorts his friend to an estate house in the process of restoration, and slits his throat. Having done this foul deed, he is then obliged to match wits against the dandified Inspector Ludlow, the clever Madam Charlotta, the grasping Minister Goodfellow, and the nefarious Lord Wexton on whose property this murder was committed.
In The Gold Key, Arthur Davis crafts a sinister tale that could have been taken from the darkened soul of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Allen Poe, with just a tinge of Alfred Hitchcock.
The Gold Key is a gripping gothic murder mystery told through the corrupt mind of a man steeped in self-righteous anger and revenge.
“Who am I…who was I…what have I become…what will I become…what of me will survive and…is it worth saving…”
Yet a man’s life was not the only thing taken that fateful afternoon in the wine cellar. A gold key, “a forgotten, irrelevant bauble” of unknown purpose passed from the pocket of the deceased into that of the killer. As he pays his respects to the grieving widow, his circumstances take a sudden turn for the better, though not without cost.
“I am who I am. Who I always was; only a more disfigured version than before and now with this potential, stridently more unpleasant to behold.”
Though Davis’ main character has no name, his theatrically loquacious narrative cleverly blends the cerebral and the carnal and provides a maniacal portrait of a man, and the landscape of nineteenth century London he inhabits.
In The Gold Key, Davis artfully illustrates how dark a man’s desires may run, and to what lengths he will go to fulfill them.
The Gold Key
Novel reviewed by M. Barnes in July 2008
A truly tangled web is woven when the powers of a golden trinket reveal themselves in Arthur Davis’ eerie and startling narrative. The seething changes of a slow-burn transformation in one man, and tangential others, expose the pitfalls of personal pride and avarice.
Opening from a remote, abandoned wine cellar into the world of well-worn London streets where horse-drawn carriages abound, the vascular verbiage of our main character reveals all.
The bloody trail from the wine cellar where horror swarms with the rats follows his every footstep, through the theatre of his professional downfall to seedy underbelly of a life so familiar with professional courtesans. These ladies of the night prove his comfort and his constable.
A gold key is at the center of the swarming plot that removes the nameless lead character from the hopelessly linear life resulting from his professional fall from grace. The fixation resulting from its powers of influence and subsequent curse set the stage of ruin for a man of grievous self-importance.
Shakespearean twists and Machiavellian motives steer the reader through sinister murders, perverse tragedies and endless indulgences of the flesh.
Davis has written a masterful tale of a man’s squalid path through one of London’s most indigent time periods.
There is no secreting away the sinister aura of this tale, where the question, “What have I become,” echoes throughout each word and deed of Davis’ staunch and trembling monologue.