In 1876, the fabled lawman Strother Purcell disappears into a winter storm in the mountains of British Columbia, while hunting down his outlawed half-brother. Sixteen years later, the wreck of Purcell resurfaces – derelict and homeless – in a San Francisco jail cell. And a failed journalist named Barrington Weaver conceives a grand redemptive plan. He will write Purcell’s true-life story. All it requires is a final act…

What unfolds is an archetypal saga of obsession, lost love, treachery, and revenge. A deadpan revisionist Western, refracted through a Southern Gothic revenge tragedy, The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a novel about two cursed brothers, a pair of eldritch orphans, the vexed nature of truth, and the yearnings of that treacherous sonofabitch the human heart.

* * *

“A literary exegesis on truth disguised as a rollicking, tragic Western entertainment. Cain and Abel and the Sisters Brothers got nothing on towering Strother Purcell and his club-footed half-brother Elijah Dillashay. When lies are this well-loved they transform into truth and truth into history. On top of all that, it’s hilarious.”

--Hart Hanson, author of The Driver

“What a fantastic yarn, as they say, by turns tragic and droll, intimate and expansive, with every thread stretching taut towards an epic conclusion. The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is also, if you get past the page-turning thrill of it, a fascinating and insightful commentary on how stories are built, and on our determination to see them come to light and be given their due. As for Strother, he strides on the page – epic and tragic – a man trapped in the myths of manhood and gunslinging, a man of a bygone era, who cannot allow bygones to be just that.”

--Claire Mulligan, author of The Dark and The Reckoning of Boston Jim

“Ian Weir takes every trope in the Western’s play-book – the one-eyed avenging lawman, the feckless brother, tarts both with and without hearts, gunslingers, gimps, and gamblers – and makes of them something new and utterly wonderful.”

--C.C. Humphreys, author of Plague and Chasing the Wind

“Masterfully crafted storytelling, witty and pacy and scratchy with grit. When it comes to the ‘Canadian Western,’ Ian Weir thrills and heartbreaks in similar ways as Guy Vanderhaeghe, and if all that sounds like a good time, it is.”

--Andrew Pyper, author of The Only Child and The Demonologist

London, 1816. Romanticism is at the high tide and the metropolis is swaggering with Regency abandon. Edmund Kean is revolutionizing the theatre while setting new benchmarks in debauchery, Byron is inventing the cult of celebrity, and scientific discovery is advancing with great dizzying leaps into wild and uncharted terrain.

Young Will Starling – charmer, confabulist and aspiring Rainbow – has returned after five long years on the Continent assisting in battlefield surgeries. Now he and his mentor are struggling to build a civilian practice – and a life – two floors above a gin shop in Cripplegate. This requires an uneasy alliance with the Doomsday Men, grave robbers who supply London’s surgeons and anatomists with the fresh cadavers that are essential for research. When a bungled body-snatching leads to murder – and worse – Will grows convinced that an unholy conspiracy is at work, and that its author is Dionysus Atherton, the brightest of London’s emerging surgical stars.

Soon the news sheets are a-twitter with lurid reports: medical experiments gone horribly wrong and uncanny sightings in the streets. Rumours of experimentation upon corpses not quite dead – indeed, upon corpses wide awake and wailing – in a bid to unlock the greatest Secret of all. And as Will’s investigation winds through London’s underbelly, his certainty darkens into something else: obsession. Because Will has secrets of his own.

Steeped in scientific lore, Will Starling is a tale of love and redemption, death and resurrection.

* * *

Reviews:

“Reading Will Starling is a delight, though not in the way readers might expect at the outset. Weir’s deft play with the characters and the narrative serves to unsettle and disturb, resulting in a novel that is at once rewarding and heartbreaking, satisfying on both intellectual and emotional levels….A splendid literary achievement, and a genuine pleasure.” – The Globe and Mail

“…A rollicking good yarn with many twists and turns….Will Starling is a kaleidoscope of beautiful ghastliness. It’s a lot of fun and a tale well told.” – The Vancouver Sun

“Through the stock-taking and impassioned confession-like recollections of ‘pointed and stunted’ but earnest young surgeon’s assistant Will Starling, Ian Weir (author of 2010’s Daniel O’Thunder) crafts a wonderfully, thrillingly fun—if truly smelly and gross—romp….The cadaver trade, slit throats, stabbings, cudgelings, bodies dangling from nooses, a villainous, hubristic surgeon named Dionysus Atherton, Resurrection Men, Doomsday Men, and the Boggle-Eyed Man, unholy scientific exploration, a could-be zombie, a deranged housekeeper hooked on laudanum, and a clockwork of machinations fill Will’s clever and masterfully told “lurid tale.” –The Winnipeg Review

“Weir’s lauded first novel, Daniel O’Thunder, was set in a rough, tough part of London in 1851. In his second, we’re in 1816 Regency London, and young Will, back from the Napoleonic war on the continent, is engaged in setting up a clinic in London’s dodgy Cripplegate. Weir, the creator of CBC’s Arctic Air, has written a note-perfect historical novel of body snatching, murder and evil fun.” –The Toronto Star

“Like the boy who gives the book its name, Will Starling is quick on its feet, and takes pride in always staying one step ahead of whoever it’s telling its story to….Weir has plenty more up his sleeve – not least of all a crackerjack lexicon of cobbled-together Georgian slang – to keep the material elevated well above a mere page-turner….Weir’s writing is so springy, and his vision so panoramic, that you won’t care that the novel makes you feel as though you’ve got dirt under your fingernails just from reading it. Yet amid the muck, Will Starling also presents a ringing and surprisingly touching endorsement of science over legend and anecdote.” –The National Post

“Framing the mystery within Weir’s novel is an extraordinary rendition of life in Regency-era London….Characters rollick and scheme through a plot as snaky as a London alley in a setting as powerful as a chamber pot tossed from a garret window. No happy tale this, but Starling’s adventures among the Spavined Clerk, the Wreck of Tom Sheldrake, Boggle-Eyed Bob and Alf the Ale-Draper are a delight all the same. What Dickens might have written had he set loose Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll to explore the doomsday trade.” –Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Starling is a charismatic, engaging narrator, and his personal connection to Atherton frames an underlying story of redemption and the legacy of ultimate power. A fascinating, well-researched exploration of surgery’s shift from disreputable butchery to medical science, shot through with an irresistible Frankenstein current.” –Booklist

"Weir's magnificent new novel...is a sumptuous Frankensteinian potboiler of knockabout slang, scientific lore, rollicking personalities and atmosphere thick as fog. Weir's gift with idiom is without peer; as his narrative gambols about, the deft wordplay breathes grimy life into a wretched London. While its themes of death, scientific perversion, classism and poverty may be dark as pitch, Weir's style and wite ensures the novel remains a boisterous, subversive romp." –Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

* * *

“Mighty swinging bollocks, what a book! Will Starling drops you straight into the heart of London in the year 1816, detailing the sights, sounds, and smells (oh, the smells!) with an anatomist’s eye for detail. Ian Weir’s crackerjack novel is many things: a whodunit, a penny dreadful, a scrupulous historical narrative—but most of all and most simply, it is a rollicking, fireballing, big-hearted book that’s just a hell of a lot of fun to read. And by thunder, what more can a reader ask for?”

--Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City

“I know of no one else in Canada today who writes like Ian Weir. Will Starling is a rollicking romp through the English language, an earthy, bawdy, brain-bending delight.”

--Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl

“Will Starling is a sly, spirited hero who leaps off the page to take you on a riveting journey through London’s glorious, hair-raising underbelly – surgeons’ salons, gin shops, and the puzzle of Death itself – and straight into the nature of storytelling.  Weir’s prose is both raw and lyrical; his evocation of Regency London, magnificent.  Will Starling is a must read.”

--Stacy Carlson, author of Among the Wonderful

“Ian Weir has an uncanny ear for the earthy slang of Regency London. His characters are as engaging as the Artful Dodger or Fagin or Martin Chuzzlewit.”

--Roberta Rich, author of The Harem Midwife

jack

It is 1888 as I write these words. I am an old man now, scratching syllables by candlelight at an old desk in a dingy room in Whitechapel . . .

Sometimes I write of the Devil, and of his activities amongst us in London some decades ago, my connection to which may grow more clear as we proceed. But mainly I write of a man named Daniel O’Thunder, who was—who remains— the most remarkable I have ever met. . .

I may here and there have invented certain facts, but always in the service of a greater Truth. As indeed did Matthew and Mark and Luke and John—and every single word they wrote was Gospel.

This, then, is my Book of Daniel. In writing it—in telling you the tale of Daniel O’Thunder, and his deadly Enemy—I am of course telling the tale of myself as well. And to tell my story we must begin where it all began to go so wrong.

- Finalist for the 2010 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book

- Finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award

- Finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

- Finalist for the 2009 Canadian Authors' Association Award for Fiction

Set in mid-Victorian London, Daniel O'Thunder interweaves the voices of several narrators to tell the tale of a troubled but charismatic ex-prizefighter who challenges none other than the Devil to meet him in the ring: bare knuckles, London Prize Rules. Chosen by The Library Journal as one of the best historical novels of 2011.

* * *

"'Dickensian' is an adjective too often misused in describing books set in Victorian England. It is, however, the perfect word for this superb novel, nominated for the Commonwealth Prize....Marvellous from the first paragraph." --Globe and Mail

"This thumping serving of early Victoriana dishes up some memorable characters: a not-so-little Nell, Jaunty the slippery entrepreneur, decent-hearted journalist William Piper, sinister Lord Sculthorpe and seemingly innocuous Jack Hartright. Towering above them all is Daniel O'Thunder, a former soldier and ex-prizefighter turned evangelist whose inspired preaching amid the fetid slums of the East End makes him a legend. But another figure, 'vain as an ageing tragedian,' vies with Daniel: the Devil himself. Ian weir tantalizingly incorporates clues as to his possible human identity with a terrific, fast-moving narrative." --The Guardian

"...the Devil has taken many guises in Western literature over the years. Until Ian Weir cast him into Victorian England, though, never has the dark one been asked to step into the ring...A knock-out debut." --National Post

"The battle between the great Hammer of Heaven and the evil stalking him climaxes in a fight that will leave readers breathless. This robust historical novel by an award-winning Canadian screenwriter will captivate fans of Sarah Waters and Charles Dickens." --Library Journal

"In this delicious jumble of a novel, Weir has created an epic hero....Drenched in filthy Thames water and coiffed in mutton chops, Weir's outlandish tale is a top-shelf page-turner." --Publishers Weekly

"If one unreliable narrator is enough to skew a book toward the fantastical, imagine the twists generated by four! ...it’s a sign of [Weir's] sure command that all are engaging, even when spinning bald-faced lies or subtle prevarications…This is wonderful stuff." --Georgia Straight

"Weir’s plot steps smartly, and the language crackles with the immediacy of shifting first-person voices… There are murders, rapes, hangings, prizefights, a city-wide riot, and lots of thrilling escapes." --Quill and Quire

"Ambitious in scope and structure, the book speaks in pitch-perfect Victorian diction through a wide range of characters to relate the ultimate-stakes quarrel between the pugilist preacher Daniel O’Thunder and his ultimate adversary: The Devil Himself." --Vancouver Magazine

"Laced with blood thunder, sex, murder, rape, mayhem and miracles, Ian Weir's first novel is about good versus evil…from the outset, even if we haven’t read the authors biography we know we are in skilled hands." --BC Bookworld