Tracking down a doppelganger
New mystery novel takes some very unexpected turns

We’re appreciating in “Murder Ink” this month a new book from London’s Gallic Books by the peripatetic everyman Charles Lambert. The name of the book, which was released last week, is “Birthright.” I’d rather talk about the author than the book, and the book, at 400 pages, is one of the few real page turners I’ve read and reported on in a while.

Lambert is a Brit who graduated from Cambridge University with words swirling in his head and travel claiming his thoughts. In 1978, he moved to Italy with no intentions of returning to England and obtained a job teaching English in a college where fluency in the international language was critical for high achievers. He then found a calling to teach about words themselves, and expressions and slippery idioms of the English language to advanced-degree aspirants at Roma 3 University in Rome. There, he spent 30 years at that job, traveled extensively over generous semester and summer breaks, and began to come of age with his own fiction writing. 

With writers, it’s nearly necessary to know something about their history. Ernest Hemingway became a legend, because he was Ernest Hemingway; J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene and Beryl Markham, just off the top of my head, aren’t that kind of famous, because we don’t know much about them until we are swept away with “Disgrace,” “Angle of Repose” or “West with the Night.”

And so with Charles Lambert, we need to know that he loved words, partied hardy and wrote books (nine) with the ease of a scholar and the insouciance of a vagabond.

“Birthright” is a magisterial, devious, breathless and sneaky mystery. No cops, no forensics, no car chases, not even a locked-room puzzle. Sixteen-year-old Fiona Conway, the cosseted, bored daughter of a wealthy industrialist and a graceful shrew of a mother, one day finds on her mother’s dressing table a loop on a velvet cushion.

What she found was a newspaper clipping of a girl that looked exactly like her “in clothes she didn’t remember wearing.”

Thus begins Fiona’s journey to find her doppelganger (I’ve waited years to use that word!), and therein lies the grand mystery: who is this identical girl, and who is the woman beside her?

Up to about page 170, “Birthright” was shaping up to look like a young adult novel, and I was about to put it aside, despite the compelling wordsmithing, to move on to another book. But it nagged, it cajoled with theatric paragraphs and cameos of forbidding possibilities. And it was seductive with the sense that this search for what must be Fiona’s lost and unmentioned twin was not going to end well. 

Fiona was soon to become heir to her deceased father’s vast estate, and with finding this identical likeness (I just cannot use doppelganger twice in the same piece) and having nothing to do but suffer the miserable British summer, she sets about investigating. Fiona first confides to her unapproving best friend Jennifer, who leads Fiona to her older brother, Patrick, recently paroled from prison for financial irregularities. The three begin to unravel the mystery of denial at every turn. Lives thrown asunder, the real mystery results in an embarrassingly mis-predicted murder, a clumsy cover-up and … Ah, I can’t say any more without a plot spoiler. And a good plot it is, which doesn’t deserve a leak of unexpected circumstances.

So that brings us back to Lambert. I see him as a literary gypsy and forever a midlist author for lack of taking himself more seriously. Lambert writes very well; it appears to come easy. He seems to have fun writing, so no need for the posturing and soul-searching. Lambert, I’m sure, would be fun to know and more fun to be related to. “Birthright” won’t hit the charts, but it could if Lambert stopped traipsing around the world, quit teaching for a paycheck, stopped partying, moved to New York City, had a couple of suits made and worked the publishing consortium. 

You’ll like this book. You’ll lend this book. You can afford this 400-page paperback original for $18 less with your “Murder Ink” 15% discount at Maria’s Bookshop.