Cold case files

Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations, by Charles Nicholl, Allen Lane, RRP£20, 318 pages

Charles Nicholl, our finest literary and historical detective, is drawn to subjects of dark human concern and puzzlement. The Reckoning (1992), his inquiry into the murder of playwright Christopher Marlowe, scrutinised Elizabethan assize records with forensic exactitude; his last book, The Lodger (2007), explored a murky period of Shakespeare’s life in Jacobean London.

Nicholl’s 10th book, Traces Remain, gathers 25 of his essays and articles written over two decades. As the title suggests, the pieces selected are concerned with murder, disappearance and dissembled identity. Was the Victorian pimp and psychopath Joseph Silver, in fact, Jack the Ripper? (Through a patient accumulation of evidence, Nicholl intimates that he was.) Elsewhere, scholarship is combined with meticulous biblio-sleuthing. “The Field of Bones”, a hybrid of police inquisition and travelogue, recreates the last days of the Elizabethan author and traveller Thomas Coryate, who vanished in Gujarat in 1617. His resting place remains uncertain but Nicholl offers a plausible site based on a scrutiny of 17th-century documents.

With a few deft strokes, Nicholl is able to conjure an atmosphere of menace. “Death of an Alchemist” explores the life of Edward Kelley, the Elizabethan spirit medium, who died in Bohemia in about 1597, apparently as a result of a fall from a prison rampart. Did he jump? Nicholl can only surmise. No less puzzling is the disappearance in 1960s Malaya of the American silk merchant Jim Thompson. Not a trace of him was found and, 40 years on, the case remains unresolved.

The book is crowded with vanishings and enigmas. Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet and adventurer, has long fascinated Nicholl. As a coffee dealer and gun-runner in sub-Saharan Africa, Rimbaud was a profitless mix of greed and gullibility. Having returned to France in 1891, fear-ridden and moribund, he died of gangrene aged 37. Rimbaud’s presumed house in the Ethiopian city of Harar still stands, however, and in his essay “Bet Rimbo”, Nicholl offers a starkly lyrical account of its haunted atmosphere.

Another bravura performance, “A Naughty House”, amplifies on Shakespeare’s life in London as Nicholl described it in The Lodger. The French Huguenot family with whom Shakespeare lodged in the Cripplegate area from 1603 to 1605 may have had a sideline in the sex trade. That was not so odd, says Nicholl. London at that time was a “rackety boom town” of cut-throat literary ambitions, prostitutes and other moral dangers, where the theatre was never far from the brothel.

Another master of this sort of inquisitorial literature was Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian essayist and writer whose own racconti-inchiesti (investigative tales) interrogated tribunal archives in much the same way. Nicholl, who lives in Italy, has undoubtedly read Sciascia; ultimately, however, he stands triumphantly on his own. There is not a bad sentence among these fine-crafted essays.

One of the best scrutinises Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines, anatomical dissections, hydraulic devices and assorted weaponry. The “marvellous uncluttered clarity” of da Vinci’s prose is a delight for Nicholl. John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquary and biographer, was another genius of literary compression. Aubrey’s Brief Lives (some of them no longer than a paragraph) should serve as a model to “today’s 800-page merchants”, says Nicholl tartly.

By his own admission, Nicholl shares something of Aubrey’s enthusiasm for eclectic information and absorption in minutiae. In “Crows”, a beautiful reminiscence, he contemplates the ravens he has encountered in his life and in the works of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. The essay radiates a melancholy sense of wonder. On every page, Nicholl upholds the virtue of good writing combined with emotional and intellectual engagement. Traces Remain is as deliciously readable and absorbing as top-notch Sherlock Holmes.

Ian Thomson is author of ‘Primo Levi: A Biography’ (Vintage)