>How the novelist hid his cruel side – infidelity, bullying callousness, malice – in plain sight in his fiction. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is a biography ready to take risks. Wading away from the shore – where the crowd laughs at comic turns and weeps at the pathos of orphans – AN Wilson takes six deep-sea dives in search of the monsters of the lower waters. He is after the darker things Dickens could conceive, and the question is how much of Dickens himself went into what appear distorted fantasy creatures moving about in the murk and preparing to injure others.

Chicken with demons!

To explore the nature of evil makes for an absorbing read and a subject that adds weight to biography itself. This is an ambitious and now and then strained attempt to lift the genre into line with the moral depth of Dante’s Inferno and with Conrad’s fictional counterpart lurching about a sepulchral city, almost maddened by his encounter with the “horror” of what lurks in men’s hearts: “I daresay I was not very well at that time.”