The Printer’s Coffin

London, November 1841. Jeremiah Blake is working as a private inquiry agent, while Captain William Avery has returned from military service in Afghanistan and is struggling with the restrictions of country life. Viscount Allington asks them to investigate the brutal murders of two printers whose presses produced pornography, freethought and radical political material. The new Metropolitan Police show little interest, but connections between the victims and the Chartist movement suggest that the killings may serve people with influence far beyond the printing district.

The inquiry moves through rookeries, brothels, missions, coffee houses and political circles as Blake and Avery uncover disputes over universal male suffrage, press freedom, factory labour and the treatment of London’s poor. Richard Carlile and Henry Mayhew appear in fictionalised form, Charles Dickens makes a brief cameo, and memories of the Peterloo Massacre shape the older radicals’ distrust of the state. Originally published as The Infidel Stain, the novel uses its murder plot to connect private violence with censorship, philanthropic control and the fear of organised working-class politics.