The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable

Carol Baxter's latest book The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable is a genuinely interesting read.

Carol is highly-regarded in Australia as a genealogical researcher. Some years ago she befriended me at the state archival offices in Sydney and encouraged me to become a self-published author of family histories, following in her own footsteps. Since then, Carol's writing horizons have continued to expand and she has achieved commercial success in a field she describes as narrative non-fiction, her subjects being some of Australia’s colourful colonial characters including the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.

In The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable, Carol has told the intriguing story of a forger named John Tawell who was transported to Sydney in 1815, made his fortune in the colony and eventually returned to England, just like Magwitch in Great Expectations, the Charles Dickens novel of 1860. Thanks to Carol, Tawell is now flagged as having some significance in Sydney’s early history, but he was always an historical figure of interest in England. Carol has even pipped another writer to the post in recounting the wider significance of Tawell’s sensational trial for the poisoning murder of a certain Sarah Hart near Slough in the winter of 1845.

The Electric Constable is a good non-fiction read because Carol, who promotes herself as a ‘history detective’, is an expert when it comes to uncovering and converting historical material into riveting text. She tells the Tawell story in the active, not passive, voice, allowing readers to feel present in the moment. The story is well-paced, with accurate historical dialogue. In her Author’s Note at the end of the book she explains her technique, which works well when extensive supplies of contemporary documents and media reports of court hearings are available to the historian, as in this case.

The lengthy sections of traditional exposition of relevant historical events are also told in Carol’s lively and colourful style. A trained linguist, she has a commanding and impressive grasp of the English language, even if adjectives sometimes dominate. The book taught me much about nineteenth century topics of personal interest: the electric telegraph, the Great Western Railway, Quakerism (the ‘peculiar people’), British legal processes, chemistry, forensic medicine and aspects of Sydney in its early days.

However, Carol’s laudable attempt at tackling the genre of ‘true-crime thriller’ or murder mystery did not entirely work for me. Somehow the flow was not quite right, although Carol did keep me avidly turning the page to find out if Tawell really did commit the crime. It was scarcely believable that a man bent on murder, as the evidence portrayed him for much of the book, could have made so little effort to disguise his identity, and I found myself puzzled by many unanswered questions until the closing moments of the book - and afterwards.

Carol used the electric telegraph as the ‘hook’ for her story, but to me it was fundamentally about something else altogether – Tawell’s psychological profile. Without giving the game away here, that profile becomes clear at the end and it must make his case study a fascinating read for mental health professionals. The book also provides an excellent ‘how to’ lesson for all writers of non-fiction life stories from our past. I have certainly gained much from reading this book and I gave it a 4 star rating on Goodreads. Thank you, Carol.