ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE

Edgy British writer Seabrook makes his US debut with a fraught tour of the coast of East Kent, finding the place home to a fiendish lot indeed, very noir and quite Victorian too.

In his literary detective adventure, Seabrook travels from Margate round North Foreland to Broadstairs and Ramsgate and thence down to Deal, where the odd Mr. Eliot gazed at the Channel and completed The Waste Land. Lunatic fairy painter Dick Dadd did in his Daddy there. Did the deed inspire Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as Seabrook suggests? The seaside house of Lord Curzon, inherited from his wealthy American wife after nasty legal wrangling, was later occupied by fascist Oswald Mosely and other famous British bigots, including Audrey Hepburn’s father and notorious wartime broadcaster Lord Haw Haw. What was the connection between the nearby stairway down to the water and Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps? Other dark doings include boxer Freddie Mills, proprietor of a popular Chinese restaurant, sitting dead of a gunshot wound in his Citroën. He met his end four decades ago, right around the time someone was reprising the works of London’s Jack with the murders of all those Kent prostitutes. Then there was the dissolute Robin Maugham, cavorting with various degenerates. How did his louche story, “The Servant,” fare in the film version? (The autocratic Captain Maugham, Seabrook slyly notes, “remained largely indifferent to the taste he left in people’s mouths.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink!) All those low goings-on right off the High Street are quite titillating, of course, which is just the way the Brits like their shockers. Overcoming a decided tendency to seriously muddle the narrative, the author sneaks up by fits and starts on his bizarre subjects and eventually carries the day despite the discursions and raised eyebrows.

An entertaining catalogue of the devils of East Kent, stranger than the fiction many of them engendered. (b&w illustrations)