The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

Susie Berneis impresses as narrator of Valerie Martin's excellent historical fiction. In 1872, the ship Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Africa. The undamaged vessel's cargo was intact, but there was no sign of a single crew member. Young Arthur Conan Doyle hears of this mystery and writes a fictionalized account. Berneis gives credible voices to bits and pieces from letters, diaries, ship's logs, court records, and poetry as the story unfolds. Part sea story, part love story, part ghost story, filled with intriguing characters, from the Mary Celeste's captain, Benjamin Briggs, and his wife, to Violet Petra, a spiritualist medium, to Phoebe Grant, the tabloid journalist who hopes to expose Violet as a fraud. Berneis moves seamlessly between time periods and human emotions. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

September 30, 2013
Martin (Property) uses one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of all time as the starting point for a complex exploration of several different characters, including Arthur Conan Doyle. The melancholic and moving prologue, set in 1859, foreshadows the disaster that befalls a ship named Early Dawn. In 1872, the brig Mary Celeste, en route from New York to Genoa, is found floating at sea, no one aboard, and no real clues as to what happened to its crew of seven, including the captain, Benjamin Briggs; his wife; and his daughter. A decade later, Doyle, who has not yet created Sherlock Holmes, writes a fictional account of the ship’s fate, in which a lunatic passenger is responsible for a massacre of the others onboard. “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” elicits strong reactions from those who knew the Briggs family. Martin is less concerned with exploring theories about what actually happened than in the repercussions of the baffling disappearances, in a manner that will remind some of the Australian writer Joan Lindsay.