A Filthy Trade by Albert Pryce

Conan the Barbarian: thanks to Games Radar 

Title: A Filthy Trade

Author: Albert Pryce

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London #6)

Albert Price, multiple Booker Prize shortlistee and a man whose appearances on Radio 4 are so frequent that Broadcasting House has given him his own entry pass, is the author of A Filthy Trade. According to the Times Literary Supplement, it beautifully inverts Dostoyevsky’s premise in its portrayal of a man who, having murdered his wife out of sheer exasperation, proves to have a higher degree of morality than the corrupt and degraded detectives who pursue him.

Albert Price’s debut novel Cunning Men wins a literary award. His last book but one, An Immovable Subject, is a semi-autobiographical account of how he left his second wife, mother of his daughter Albertina, after falling in love with an American Intern half his age. The Intern becomes wife number three and mother of two children. 

On Albert’s bookshelves is a selection of pulp science fiction novels by writers unknown to our hero Peter: TJ Morton (author of The Crystal Spires of Mazarin), Allen Vincent, and Carter Houston who apparently specialised in mighty thewed barbarians, and (if the quotes on the front are to be believed) is favourably compared with Howard’s Conan and John Norman’s Gor. All three of these authors turn out to be Albert Price’s father under a selection of noms de plumes, who otherwise led a blameless life teaching Military History at Aberystwyth University.

Also mentioned in The Hanging Tree is an autobiography by Lady Helena Louise Linden-Limmer, Growing Up Wild: A Childhood in Africa. In 1964 Lady Helena was photographed by David Bailey wearing nothing but a leopardskin coat. 

There’s a brief reference to something called The Wild Ledger for sale on eBay, and then there’s On the Natural Order of the Unnatural by Joseph Malzeard. Plus, of course we already know about Sir Isaac Newton’s famous Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, his rather less well-known Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis (see The Rivers of London for a start), and now there are two sets of people running around trying to get their paws on a manuscript of Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Principia: Magni Operis Principia Chemica, ‘Chymical Principles of the Great Work’. Lady Helena seems to be the winner here.

And finally a 1912 reprint of Méric Casaubon’s A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits. Yes, a second edition, and published by Russell House Press which is one of (one of! - how many can there be?) the Folly’s publishing arms.

Dr John Dee: thanks to Wikipedia