The Wicked Trade

William Bentley, of the press ship BITER faces murder, corruption and poor dental health while doing the Royal Navy's dirty work at Deptford. ...The reader is up to his knees in the viscous ooze of Deptford Creek where mouldering timber hulks and mouldier specimens of humanity are engaged on His Majesty's Service, which includes duplicity, murder, the wholesale removal of young women's teeth and beating the lights out of any scrofulous wreck capable of being bullied out onto a yardarm.... Seamen are pirates, killers and thugs, all grinning toothlessly - I hate to think what dentists must have done to the author in the past. It's fly-on-the-wall, warts-and-all, fast-and-furious stuff, in which Bentley's life, like that of his more rarified ancestor Hornblower, reflects as much the time in which he has been written as the time in which he sails; the privileged are stripped bare, institutions are corrupt and money is god. But let's hear it for Deptford: its literary moment has come.