Greed, need, and simple survival

A brilliantly dark anatomy of harm and hope

The Specimens by Mairi Kidd is historical crime fiction - and a great deal more.

There was a rhyme that did the rounds in early 19th century Edinburgh:

“Up the close and doon the stair,
But and ben wi' Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef.”

Burke and Hare were ‘resurrection men’ and Dr Knox the anatomist who bought the bodies from them. While it was legal to perform public dissections during anatomy lectures in Edinburgh in the 1820s, the bodies had to be provided from foundlings and orphans, suicides, and those who had died in prison. There were simply not enough of these eligible corpses to supply the Edinburgh medical school, which was one the leading anatomy schools in Europe, and Dr Knox one of its leading anatomists. After supplying one dubious corpse to Knox almost by chance - the man had died in Hare’s lodging house, owing rent, and Knox happened to be the doctor to whom they sold his body - the two Irishmen went on to kill at least sixteen more men, women and children over the course of about eighteen months, selling each body to Knox at the rough going rate of £10 a corpse.

These are known facts, and they provide the underlying skeleton for this remarkable book, but its beating heart lies elsewhere, in the almost entirely fictional lives of two women - Knox’s wife Susan, and William Burke’s long-time lover Helen.

Mairi Kidd is profoundly knowledgeable about the living conditions available to women in Scotland in early 19th century, and draws a heartbreakingly vivid picture of the ways in which her two central characters battle against almost overwhelming odds simply to survive. The novel draws us into the stories of these two women, and of their relationships to the men with whom their lives are entangled, so that the crimes of Burke and Hare come to seem almost tangential within the complex tapestry of brutality, cruelty and misogyny which Kidd evokes.

A rich, brilliant, dark book, immaculately researched, and entirely riveting as, knowing the final, dreadful outcome, we desperately want these two closely imagined and deeply sympathetic women to survive and, perhaps, somehow, to succeed.