If you didn’t already know that Frank Tallis was a psychologist, you would guess it from his series of novels set in Vienna at the end of the nineteeth century. Although the five novels featuring the tubby, torte and strudel-gobbling Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are thrillers, a strong element of psychology is added by Rheinhardt’s friend Dr Max Liebermann, a psychoanalyst.
Of course 1890s Vienna was the time of Sigmund Freud, so most of the theories that surface in Deadly Communion are classically Freudian ideas. At the start of the story, Liebermann is analysing a patient who is convinced that he’s seen his own doppelganger and that it’s a harbinger of doom. Across town, Rheinhardt and his younger assistant Haussman are drawn into the first of a series of grisly murders of women who seem to have been killed after – or during – sexual congress – hence the title of the novel.
Vienna at this time was full of beauty and culture which encompassed both ends of the scale from the grandiose to the earthy, the affluent to the poor. Gustav Klimt created stunningly rich paintings glimmering with gold and romance for those in high society while a few years later, the more tortured and less accepted Egon Schiele preferred to portray young women in more raw, gritty poses, dishevelled and partially dressed. Tallis alludes to the propensity of Schiele for pubescent girls in stages of undress by involving in his novel an artist with such tastes whose work is confiscated. He also includes the world of couture in the form of a successful fashion designer, and thus blends history with fiction in his evocation of the clothes of the time and the move by some to try and free women from the tyranny of the corset.
Because of the nature of the crimes there is a fair bit of graphic description in Deadly Communion. I did wince during autopsies when the colourful Professor Mathias employed unconventional methods to detect sex had taken place. Or perhaps those methods were really used in those days; advances in medicine and ethics may be illustrated by the fact that when I was a medical student in 1987 it was routine for groups of medical students to do unconsented internal examinations on anaesthetised women in gynae lists - a practice that filled me with revulsion and was soon banished.
The third person narration of events in Deadly Communion is interspersed with first person accounts by the killer himself filling the reader in on his childhood and mental state. By the time the killer is caught, we already know why he did what he did, so the section where Liebermann asks the imprisoned killer to write down his life story (and, implausibly, the killer complies), is superfluous.
In the novel, Liebermann helps Rheinhardt capture the killer by predicting his psychological mindset and circumstances. Tallis employs Freud himself to expound on his theories in fictional scenes where he has conversations with others, with the dialogues based on Freud’s work. While the theories themselves are explained with diligence and accuracy ( unsurprisngly considering Tallis’s profession), the neat way Liebermann makes assumptions about both his patient, the serial killer, and another killer in town, are unconvincingly pat; real life isn’t like the textbooks. There is also some heavy Freudian symbolism: Liebermann’s patient dreams a Jack and the Beanstalk dream; the bean stalk is immediately identified by Liebermann as being a symbol for an erect penis, and the ogre in the castle at the top is the patient’s father, and these insights guide Liebermann to solving the mystery of the patient’s case. The ease with which the psychoanalyst jumps correctly to other conclusions, such as the way he infers that the victims are killed during sex and not after, is also a bit of a hard lump to swallow.
And yet, despite its tendency to make Freudian theory solve the matter too slickly, Deadly Communion is a well written novel, both as a thriller and as a historical evocation of Vienna at that time. Tallis brings fin de siecle 19 C Vienna to life with accomplished descriptions of the city – the architecture, the people, the cafes, the food. He is also obviously a classical music buff because Mahler, Beethoven and Bach’s compositions, performed live, are evoked in soaring, sensitive prose. And Tallis has steeped himself in the era – references are made to prominent figures of the time in many spheres – Rokitansky in pathology, Landsteiner in haematology, Loos in architecture, the Secession artists and their influences on design and fashion. One character even looks like Schubert.
His style of writing is unembellished and lucid, and incorporates a dry drollerie which makes the pages turn quickly, such as when a spurned Haussman closes a door ‘with just enough surplus force to declare his wounded pride.’
My only criticisms of this cerebral historical murder mystery is the aforementioned glibness with which Freudian theory solves all the puzzles. In all other respects Tallis’s novel is thoughtful and intelligent.
