Smith is an outstanding book on many counts. Set in the author's favoured period, the mid-eighteenth century, the story owes its unerring sense of period partly to the characters. But though they are, you might say, period types … they transcend costumes, idiom, manners, because the author uses them to communicate more than just a sense of the past. This intricate mystery of ancient wrongs and present revenge has the kind of tempo and vitality we expect from Leon Garfield. Adventure is here, initiated when Smith … witnesses a murder seconds after he has snatched a document from the pocket of the victim. What the document holds, how Smith worries at its secret and what danger his curiosity brings—explanations follow logically on event in scenes in Newgate, in the streets of Holborn, on Highgate Heath—and for these scenes the author has first worked at background facts and then felt himself into the past. The prose in this book is noticeably less staccato than that of Devil-in-the-fog and there is more time allowed for reflection and for the proper emerging of character. For the reader is not told but shown how to understand that two paths converge—the path of the vagrant boy, independent, shunning affection, unwilling to trust or to like, and that of the magistrate who has to come to compassion a different way, by seeing the limitations of the legal form which has comforted his physical blindness. I doubt if anyone in 1967 will write a book so rich in the furnishings of historical fiction which offers also such a fascinating and such a valid study of human beings. (p. 935)
Margery Fisher, in her Growing Point, July, 1967.
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