Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for him. The couple sedate the old man, reduce him to his dotage and raid his savings. Happerton also masterminds a raid on the strong-room of a City jewellers — echoes here of the jewellery raid in Taylor’s previous novel, At the Chime of a City Clock.
All the while, with smug, relentless guile, he also collects the promissory notes of a debt-ridden squire called Davenant, a lonely widower who lives with his emotionally retarded daughter in a decaying house in the Lincolnshire Wolds. After forging Davenant’s signature on some bills, Happerton is able to encompass his ruin. He gets hold of the great prize, a prodigious racehorse called Tiberius, which Davenant owns, together with his prey’s ancestral manor. Davenant drowns himself in a ditch. But instead of backing Tiberius honestly, Happerton uses the proceeds of the jewellery raid to lay bets on its rivals, and mounts a broken old jockey on his favourite. It is Happerton, though, not the jockey, who is heading for a tumble.
Taylor takes risks with his novel as daring as his villain’s. It is a clever pastiche of Victorian melodrama, and a sustained exercise in misanthropic whimsy. Although whimsy works best in miniature, and 400 pages of pastiche might seem testing, Taylor does not come a cropper. His favourite themes — as they were O. Henry’s and Damon Runyon’s — are the whirligigs of fortune and the squalor of criminal underworlds.
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