Where Lord Byron Is the Suspect

Riot Most Uncouth: A Lord Byron Mystery by Daniel Friedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. My 5-star rating is way over the average, which sits right at 3.

I'm shocked at that result. I thought this was a really great novel. (I see a bunch of disgruntled Byron stans gave this a 1. But the most common score was a 5. I get it now.)

At the beginning, I almost DNF'd the book. Lord Byron is the main character, and as most people know, he was kind of a jerk. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Probably worse than that. And here, he is portrayed as an absolute malignant narcissist--which he might or might not have been. The Byron in the novel is a horrible man whose only virtue (besides being a good writer, I suppose) is that he generally is honest about himself, not pretending, for example, when he's seducing a woman, that he will ever love her or take care of her or anything noble. Most of the time, there is no sign of virtue, though. He is an asshole and uses his status as a club to injure people that mostly don't deserve his cruelty.

I don't like books with characters I have no sympathy for. That's my biggest turnoff in reading and in movies. Somehow, though, he became, by degrees, more sympathetic to me, and I started to care about him. Then I got into the story. (A similar example: Al Swearengen, in Deadwood, is a dangerous, callous, homocidal prick, but he's also smart and funny and strangely compelling. I should hate to watch him, but I don't.) Anyway, I can't totally explain why I found Byron sympathetic after all, except I guess he's also really smart, and when he's horrible to bad people it is pretty fun.

This is a mystery novel, which is one of my favorite things, and it has all the usual bits: a crime, some suspects, the gathering of clues, additional crimes, danger for the MC, and so on, but it also seems bigger than that. In part, that's because we get a lot of flashback scenes with Byron's childhood, especially revolving around his father, and the story is framed as a much older Byron revisiting the story from his university days. In terms of time, the novel is wider than the mystery, but thematically it's wide, too, touching on mental health and family relationships and the privileges of nobility, and so on, and feels in some ways like a mini-biography. I thought it worked.

There is a satisfying conclusion to the story, and though the older Byron narrating the last chapter casts doubt on some of the exact details of the mystery's end, it feels like it doesn't really matter.

Yes, he's a terrible guy, so I totally understand those who couldn't keep reading. And the mystery is bloody and violent, so that might spoil it for others. But from a certain perspective, there's a lot to laugh at here, not to mention a wild mystery to solve, and I really enjoyed reading it.

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