Most “feminist” historical crime wants you to applaud on cue. A brave woman. A cruel era. A triumph that arrives neatly packaged, so the reader can feel righteous without feeling implicated. E. S. Thomson doesn’t do that. She writes women the way a medical historian would write bodies: specific, compromised, unromantic, and still capable of brutal competence. Her pages don’t hand you empowerment as a mood. They hand you a knife and make you look at what the world has been doing, in detail, for centuries.
Thomson’s advantage is that she knows the machinery. She isn’t borrowing a few leeches and a whiff of carbolic for atmosphere. Her work is steeped in the history of medicine, and it shows in the Jem Flockhart novels: Beloved Poison, Dark Asylum, The Blood, Surgeons’ Hall, Nightshade, Under Ground. She builds plots out of institutions that claim to heal while practising control—hospitals, asylums, surgical theatres, the respectable professions that decide whose pain counts as truth and whose counts as hysteria.
And then she gives you Jem: apothecary, poison expert, street-smart and clinically observant, moving through mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh and beyond with the kind of hard-earned knowledge that men in the room keep pretending women can’t have. Jem’s life is shaped by disguise and constraint, yes—but Thomson refuses to turn that into a dainty metaphor. In these books, passing, hiding, and performing are survival logistics. Gender isn’t an identity debate. It’s access to work, safety, money, and the right to be believed when something rotten is happening behind “good” doors.
A lot of historical crime “empowers” women by giving them speeches; Thomson empowers them by giving them expertise and letting the world punish them for it.
That punishment is the point. Thomson doesn’t use oppression as wallpaper. She shows it as procedure: the condescension of doctors, the violence of institutions, the way class polices morality, the way psychiatry can be weaponised, the way sexual threat is treated like background noise until it becomes convenient evidence. If the genre’s usual fantasy is that the right heroine can outwit the era, Thomson’s counterargument is colder and truer: you can be brilliant and still get crushed by the rules—especially when your brilliance is the thing that threatens the men who wrote them.
Her medical settings are where the softness goes to die. Hospitals aren’t noble in Thomson; they’re crowded, underfunded, status-soaked, full of learning and cruelty braided together so tightly you can’t tug one free without the other. Surgeons don’t appear as glamorous geniuses. They appear as professionals inside a hierarchy—some principled, some predatory, most protected by the simple fact of being “respectable.” That’s why the series hits harder than the genre’s usual “dark Victorian” cosplay. She isn’t selling you grime. She’s selling you the social contract that produces grime, then calls it fate.
What makes this defensible—what makes it land—is that Thomson doesn’t mistake tenderness for moral certainty. Jem isn’t a slogan-machine. She’s sharp, tired, morally compromised when she has to be, and allergic to the kind of virtue that only exists when the lights are on. The books don’t angle for the polite payoff where the reader feels reassured that justice happened and the heroine is “safe now.” Safety is not the genre promise here. Consequences are.
And because Thomson is writing crime, she can show the lie at the centre of “respectable” society without preaching: the lie that harm is exceptional. In these stories, harm is routine. Harm is processed through institutions. Harm is explained away by men with credentials. Harm is turned into gossip, scandal, diagnosis, punishment—anything except accountability.
The genre loves to pretend violence is the aberration; Thomson shows it as infrastructure, with ivy growing over the sign that says “care.”
This is exactly where the genre can’t soften her. It can try—wrap her in “gritty historical mystery,” praise the “atmosphere,” call Jem “a strong female lead,” and move on. But the books keep dragging you back to the same ugly recognition: women don’t just suffer in the past; they are managed. Filed. Corrected. Observed. Institutionalised. Used as material for other people’s careers. And if you think that’s merely historical colour, you’re confessing how well the system still works.
So no, don’t read E. S. Thomson for feminist comfort. Read her because she refuses the soft lies: that competence is rewarded, that knowledge is neutral, that institutions exist to help, that survival is proof the world is fair. Her women don’t get slogans. They get scalpels. And the cut is the point. Don’t bandage it. Insist on seeing what’s underneath.
