Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries

Like many people, I'd guess, my first encounter with the work of Philip Pullman was His Dark Materials. Marketed as young adult novels, the trilogy—Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000)—featured themes not usually found in books aimed at middle schoolers, such as the murder of children, the death of God, and cosmos-healing sex between 13-year-olds.

But before Pullman became famous for His Dark Materials, he wrote another young adult series: the Sally Lockhart mysteries. It's pretty unusual for a male writer to feature a heroine; Pullman did it in both of these series.

In the first Sally Lockhart title, The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), the heroine is a 16-year-old in late Victorian London. As the book opens she is trying to learn more about the death of her father, Matthew Lockhart. Matthew was a shipping agent who drowned when his company's schooner was sunk in the South Seas with the loss of (almost) all hands, leaving Sally orphaned and virtually penniless. Sally's investigation brings her into contact with a gritty underworld of opium dens, brothels, East End slums, and street gangs.

It also brings her into contact with the legacies of British colonialism: the military occupation and exploitation of India, and the forced opium trade with China. (It soon becomes clear that the ruby of the title is derived from the former, while the smoke derives from the latter.) The later books in the series deal with the arms trade (The Shadow in the North (1986)), Jewish immigration and 19th-century social and labor movements (The Tiger in the Well (1990)), and great-power conflicts over resource-rich smaller countries (The Tin Princess (1994)). But while the books are firmly grounded in the grim realities of 19th-century capitalism and imperialism, they are also ripping yarns featuring criminal masterminds, powerful industrial magnates, international spies, and other fiendishly evil nemeses for Sally.

Aiding Sally over the course of the series are Frederick Garland, a photographer who is a few years older than Sally; Jim Taylor, an office boy and former street urchin, who becomes Frederick's assistant; and later, Daniel Goldberg, a Jewish refugee and labor organizer. As with Will in His Dark Materials, the men occasionally threaten to take over the narrative; fortunately, Sally is such a compelling character that the focus never shifts away from her for too long.

The voice of the narrator is also somewhat unusual. Sometimes the narrator adopts the limited point of view of the characters, especially when the situation is suspenseful or perilous. But at other times the narrator takes time out to explain the world of Victorian England from the standpoint of our contemporary mores—probably a necessary concession to the teenagers who are the books' intended audience, but a slightly disorienting shift in perspective nonetheless.

Apart from the narrator, there are a few other mild anachronisms as well. In The Shadow in the North, a factory is illuminated by electric light several years before the commercial manufacture of incandescent bulbs, and a character is described as having "a wide knowledge of matters on the fringe of psychology" at least a decade before the term "psychology" was in wide use. Pullman also discreetly signals his own tastes, as when he name-checks Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. Jim has a substantial collection of penny dreadfuls, referred to throughout the series, that he enthusiastically shares with other characters; after the first two novels in the Sally Lockhart series were published, Pullman wrote a book based on a character from penny dreadfuls, Spring-Heeled Jack (1989).

The level of violence in the series is amazingly high for books ostensibly aimed at young readers. Savage beatings and fights are described in gruesome detail, and over the course of the series characters are shot, stabbed, burned to death, killed by dogs, mutilated by bombs, drowned, crushed, felled by heart attacks, and plummet to their deaths. And it's not just the bad guys who get hurt: Frederick, Jim and Sally all sustain major injuries at various points, and (not to give too much away) one of them doesn't survive the series.

Another atypical aspect of the books is Pullman's frankness about sex. Prostitution, rape, and sexual torture are alluded to, although not described graphically. In the second volume in the series, The Shadow in the North, Sally and Frederick go to bed together—outside of wedlock!—while in the third volume in the series, The Tiger in the Well, it's suggested that Sally sleeps with a man she finds loathsome in order to divert suspicion and extract information.

If those aspects of the books seem aimed at modern sensibilities, other features are derived from sensationalist Victorian fiction itself. As Philip Pullman has written, "I wrote each one with a genuine cliché of melodrama right at the heart of it, on purpose: the priceless jewel with a curse on it—the madman with a weapon that could destroy the world—the situation of being trapped in a cellar with the water rising—the little illiterate servant girl from the slums of London who becomes a princess . . . And I set the stories up so that each of those stock situations, when they arose, would do so naturally and with the most convincing realism I could manage."

How convincing that realism is depends on the reader, of course. For me, the books get steadily more fantastic as the series progresses. The Tin Princess, in particular, reads a bit like a novelized Tintin adventure: it's set a central European principality riddled with spies, skullduggery and nefarious plots, which our protagonists confront with forthrightness and pluck.

A gap of several years separates each subsequent volume in the series from the previous books. The Ruby in the Smoke takes place in 1872, when Sally is 16; The Shadow in the North takes place six years later, in 1878; The Tiger in the Well three years after that, in 1881; and The Tin Princess the following year. Pullman may have created a minor dilemma for himself by spacing the books so far apart chronologically; Sally is an adult by the start of the second book, and a mother by the start of the third, which is perhaps why she only has a cameo role in the last book. I'm thinking, though, that should Pullman ever want to return to these characters—and I hope that he does—there might be room for an adventure or two in the gaps between the books in the original series.

So if you give the books to a 12-year-old, be prepared to face some interesting questions. I recommend reading them yourself first—but that's a task that will be highly enjoyable whether or not you intend to pass them on to a young person later. As with His Dark Materials, the Sally Lockhart series is utterly addictive. Once you're hooked (which for me happened by the time I hit the second chapter of the first book), you'll want to devour them all.

The first two books in the Sally Lockhart series were adapted for television, with Billie Piper in the role of Sally. I haven't yet seen these films, but it strikes me that Piper may perhaps be miscast as the autodidact Sally (she was certainly miscast as Fanny Price in ITV's dreadful 2007 Mansfield Park, miswritten by Maggie Wadey and misdirected by Ian McDonald, and broadcast in the US as part of the PBS series The Complete Jane Austen). Still, I'll reserve judgment until I have a chance to see them.

Philip Pullman's informative website includes the author's own discussions of his books, along with brief extracts from each, and was the source of the cover images of the Sally Lockhart novels in this post.

Update 8 May 2013: Last night we watched the first of the two BBC Sally Lockhart adaptations, The Ruby in the Smoke (2006), and thought that it was pretty well done—but we would have been lost in places without having read the book first. Billie Piper acquits herself well as Sally, although the actress is clearly somewhat older than the character. Pullman's Sally is 16, while we're told at the beginning of screenwriter Adrian Hodges' television version that it is 1874, making Sally 18; Piper looks to be in her mid-20s. Jim, too, who is about 13 in Pullman's book, is here portrayed by Matthew Smith, a (very tall) actor who also clearly left his teens behind half a decade ago.

Hodges makes a few other changes as well, minor (Sally gets back the pistol her father gave her, rather than having to buy another one) and major (the final confrontation with Mrs. Holland takes place at Hangman's Wharf rather than on the more dramatic Tower Bridge). The filmmakers have also made the interesting choice to bring in a third British colonial reference after the military occupation of India and the opium trade with China by casting three of the characters as Afro-Caribbean. Among them are the sailor Matthew Bedwell and his twin brother the Rev. Nicholas Bedwell, both played by David Harewood. In addition to the reference to the slave trade in the British Caribbean, there is another historical basis for this choice: the Rev. George Cousens, a prominent Afro-Caribbean minister in the mid-19th century.

In other roles, JJ Feild, a wonderfully sympathetic Henry Tilney in ITV's 2007 Northanger Abbey, is a wonderfully sympathetic Frederick Garland here. And Julie Walters is a magnificently malevolent Mrs. Holland; her performance is reason enough to watch the film.

In adapting Pullman's book into a 90-minute runtime there was necessarily some compression, particularly at the denouement, but most of the scenes, incidents and characters in the novel make it into the film. Inevitably, perhaps, the movie feels like the introduction to a series, with (as in the book) a couple of major plot threads left dangling; it's unfortunate that to date only one more entry in the series has been produced. Still, on the basis of the strengths of this film we're looking forward to seeing its sequel, The Shadow in the North (2007)—I'll post about it here once we do.

Update 17 May 2013: The adaptation of The Shadow in the North is more straightforward than that of Ruby in the Smoke, and the outlines of the story should be clear even for those who haven't read the book. As before, the Victorian setting is nicely evoked, and Billie Piper, JJ Feild, and Matt Smith make most welcome returns from the first episode.

The flaw of this second (and likely final, alas) episode in the series is its villain. In Ruby, Elliot Cowan wasn't my image of Hendrik van Eeden, but it didn't much matter—Julie Walters was the perfect embodiment of the relentlessly malignant Mrs. Holland. In Shadow, Jared Harris is also not my image of the amoral industrial magnate Axel Bellman. But here it's a bigger problem: Bellman is the central villain, and Harris simply wasn't sufficiently sinister.

I also found the blind casting, admirable though it is in theory, to be distracting in practice. Nellie Budd is played by Doña Croll, an actress born in Jamaica; casting the spiritualist medium as an Afro-Caribbean woman seemed to flirt with cliché. And the dreadlocks on Bellman's henchman Mr. Brown (Vyelle Croom) seemed, er, dreadfully anachronistic.

Still, this adaptation is pretty effective. It's a shame that the series never reached the third and fourth books, both of which have key scenes that would lend themselves readily to cinematic treatment.

Update 1 May 2013: The comments below contain spoilers—if you plan to read the books, you may want to wait until you have before taking a look at the comments.