Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

 Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition (Zaffre)

In the acknowledgements at the end of this book, Susie Dent tells how Zaffre, the publisher, approached her with the idea of her writing a novel. Considering the height of slush piles taking up space, or at least megabytes nowadays, in publishers' offices, that's a rare thing. But they saw in Susie the ideal celebrity novelist as the best-known dictionary editor in much the same way as advertisers saw Carol Vorderman's similarly established arithmetical credentials giving credence to financial products. 

At first, Susie's lexicography lays heavily on what reads more like a busman's holiday than a story. Set in 2023 among a set of Oxford dictionary professionals, I had to look up such words as 'doomscrolling' never mind appreciate all the welter burden of arcane derivations and extinct coinages. Rarely can an author have ever 'written about what they know' more than this.

Anonymous letters start to arrive in the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary, relating to the disappearance some years earlier of Charlotte Thornhill, a Ph. D. student with lots of 'rizz'. It's hard to say whether the clues they provide are more ingenious than the outrageous ingenuity shown by the CED staff in solving them but they are brilliant Oxford types so maybe it would be within their compass. I've not read Dan Brown but understand his books to be based on a lot of 'hokum'. I have seen a lot of Midsomer Murders, though. Susie's story is perhaps a confection made of elements of both but, as it develops, it becomes compelling in spite of oneself for one with an interest in the minutiae of Shakespeare biography. There seems no end to what might be invented to add, however fictionally, to the bare, substantiated evidence that there is.

The baddie turns out to be the baddie, unscrupulousness is the cause of all the trouble and vaulting ambition, both monetary and literary, is the motive. And there is a feminist sub-text which we might take as its real 'meaning'.

It's hardly literature itself but it's surely a cut above most celebrity novels if only for its showy erudition and the panoply of Oxford novels takes one more on board. I enjoyed it and raced to the end this morning even as I tried not to. As the co-author of some Shakespeare biography - that we don't regard as fiction- this could be a cautionary tale. It might be dangerous out there. We must tread carefully.