Book
The Mummy of Mayfair
First published 2024
London, 1895. Timothy Badger and Benjamin Watson accept what appears to be a straightforward security job at a fashionable mummy-unwrapping party hosted by Dr Enoch Sawyer of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Sawyer fails to appear, and when the supposedly ancient sarcophagus is opened the guests discover the doctor’s own corpse wrapped inside. The detectives must work out how a modern murder was concealed inside an event designed to display an Egyptian body, while journalists, medical colleagues, collectors and society guests all have reasons to shape the story.
The mystery draws on Victorian Egyptomania and the long European practice of treating Egyptian human remains as collectible, scientific and even entertaining objects. By the 1890s public archaeology and museum culture had made ancient Egypt intensely fashionable, while hospitals and medical institutions carried their own hierarchies of expertise and reputation. Westerson uses the grotesque substitution at the centre of the party to expose the period’s mixture of scholarship, spectacle and commodification, grounding Tim and Benjamin’s investigation in the social world of late-Victorian London.
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