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Book Coach Corner: The Trail of the Serpent
Background: What Is Book Coach Corner?
Book Coach Corner is a blog series that allows me (your neighborhood-friendly book coach) to analyze books, TV shows, and movies. I will then dissect them in terms of story structure. As a heads up: there will be spoilers, and some posts may not make sense if you haven’t seen/read the work.
Those are the details. This entry explores The Trail of the Serpent, a 19th-century novel considered to be the first British detective novel.
Synopsis
The story follows Jabez North, a vile murderer, who kills a man and takes on a new identity. (A bunch of other stuff happens? But not with a lot of coherence.)
Quick Thoughts
I’ll just say it: This book is not great. If I were an editor, I would have cut it down from 400 pages to 200. Despite having multiple murders, a deaf detective, a prison break, surprise twins, a family secret, and a hidden fortune, it somehow still manages to be…pretty dull.
It was written by Mary Elizabeth Haddon who would go on to write Lady Audley’s Secret, which is a beloved classic in England. I haven’t read that book, but you can definitely see the seeds of a fantastic writer in here.
