BLEEDING HEART SQUARE - Andrew Taylor

Storytelling or Storyweaving?  BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is a classic example of a carefully woven psychological suspense story written by one of the English masters.  Mind you, this isn't going to be a book for everyone.  It's one of those stories that starts out with central threads that slowly are interwoven towards the conclusion. 

Something has happened in connection to 7 Bleeding Heart Square.  In 1934, Lydia Langstone seeks refuge there from her violent husband.  It's a decaying London cul-de-sac, in a time that is feeling the threat of war.  It's a seedy part of the city and the people who live in Number 7 are all somewhat marginalised.  Not least of all Lydia's estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who is determinedly drinking himself into oblivion.  Turning to the Captain is safe for Lydia - she's got a difficult relationship with her mother, at the very least, a supporter of her abusive husband.  For Lydia life with her father brings no expectations, a brand-new start.  Despite the spectre of the scandal of a divorce, the problem is not Lydia and her father, who learn to rub along together surprisingly quickly, but rather events that seem to weave in and out of the house at Number 7.  Unknown to Lydia the middle-aged spinster that owns the house - Miss Penhow vanished 4 years earlier, and there are people who are very keen to find out what happened to her.  Many of those people make their way to Number 7 as a starting point, unaware of other's interest.  The story unfolds between Lydia's day to day life, as she slowly becomes aware of things not quite right in the house and surrounding area; and a narrative of another life - eventually revealed as Miss Penhow's own words. 

There's a sense of slowness about parts of the book that the reader needs to accept for what they are.  Taylor is an expert at taking the reader just to the brink of a discovery, a change, an event; then rapidly moving the focus somewhere else.  As the day to day events of Lydia's life seem to distract from Miss Penhow's own narrative; as the story of Miss Penhow slowly reveals itself, the action moves around and changes direction and weaves itself slowly into a full picture.  The overall atmosphere of the book sets it well in 1930's London - the seedy nature of the location, the underlying political torment in a society feeling the threat of war, the clash of the aristocracy and the less well off.  Even the forays into the countryside illustrate the difference between lives then and now.

Not a book for fans of crimes up front, heaps of action, investigations and rapidfire pace, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is psychological suspense at its strongest.  It's a manner of storyweaving that Taylor seems to excel in.  All the while that the story builds to it's final conclusion there's a knowledge that something has happened, there's an assumption that something dreadful has happened to Miss Penhow but there's no proof and there's no certainty.  At the same time, the reader can't help but wonder if Number 7 Bleeding Heart Square will somehow weave Lydia's fate for her as well.