Free The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers

the courses do appear to be at Oxford, I suppose it isn’t a complete con. I don’t know. He’s American, from some expensive little Liberal Arts placein the Midwest. I don’t think anybody’s taught him much before—well—but he’s sharp. It’s interesting. Basically, he said he wanted to write a piece on early detective literature, so they dug me out to help, and I persuaded him, for my own convenience, to focus on Bleak House .’
    â€˜Why’s that?’ Joe sat down opposite her with his own food.
    Kit suddenly really wanted to go. She’d had enough. She had walked, talked, drunk with, gone to bed with, and broken bread with this man. She had shattered herself dancing with him backwards. It was enough. Who was he? She would have talked about his work, except he’d twice told her not to, and she was too tired to parry or think up some other gambit.
    She struggled to finish her food, before retrieving his question from the back of her mind and responding mechanically, ‘It’s the first great English example. It has a detective in it who’s based on a real detective called Charles Field, and it also has other, recognised detective standins—a lawyer’s clerk; the detective’s wife. In England, before detectives-proper existed, along with humble police inspectors you also had lawyers’ clerks and insurance men as functionally the detective class. Actually, Dickens started out as a lawyer’s clerk, but not in a good way. Still, that’s by the by. What I’m doing for Orson is a more or less Dickens-and-detectives thing, starting with Oliver Twist , and blah, blah, blah. I teach him on Thursdays, then I email him his next reading list on the Friday, after I’ve chatted to him in the tutorial to find out how he thinks he wants to slant things next—makes him feel he has input.’ Shesmiled to herself. ‘I was instructed to involve him in the process.’
    â€˜Right. And Oliver Twist? That fits in how?’
    For a split second this question pleased Kit, the fact that Joe was interested enough to ask—or was prepared to pretend, in plausible style, to be interested. Nobody was interested. She continued to smile, while saying diffidently, and sounding, she thought, about ninety, ‘Oh, I won’t go on.’
    He responded with a believable noise of dissent.
    What to do? Kit sighed. Truly, she wanted to leave now. But there sat this person she hardly knew, waiting for her to speak. ‘Okay,’ she said, not quite patiently, ‘ Oliver Twist , Dickens started it the beginning of 1837, before the detective department existed; we’re talking the year Queen Victoria came to the throne. He originally conceived it as just a few instalments of pretty blunt polemic about the poor, and only afterwards had this brainwave to bump it out into a full-length, crime-novel-romance thing. If you take the plot apart, it really doesn’t work well at all. But he couldn’t revise the opening as it was already in print, which left him with crazy narrative problems to unravel; plus he’d landed himself with this goody-goody, orphan-waif hero to carry a whole book. But he hashed up a longer plot regardless, and—so, yes, it’s incredibly violent in parts, and all the crimes in it effectively solve themselves without police work, that’s the basic point. What I’m saying is, Oliver Twist was simply so Orson could draw fruitful comparisons across from the start of Dickens’s career to Bleak House , which was 1853, in the middle.’ She looked Joe in the eye and said, a little insolently, ‘Get?’
    â€˜Put like that, I do.’ He offered her apples, biscuits and cheese, coffee; but Kit refused them all.
    â€˜Speaking of work, honestly—’ She stood up and pushed her chair back in under the table, walked out of the kitchen to the little hallway, put on her coat—Joe