Historical crime fiction: Does the crime fit the time?

I pondered the question of what makes good historical crime fiction recently after reading Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death, as I had from time to time previously with respect to other books.

I realize now why the book worked: the crime fit the time. It’s 1170, and the Jews of Cambridge have been accused of murdering children. England’s King Henry II, for whom the economically active Jews are a source of tax revenue, wishes to clear them, if possible, and he sends for the book’s title character, who sets the investigation in motion.

Humans have likely been killing one another forever, so an author who sets a story in a time other than his or her own has one big question to answer: Why one period over any other? Why set a story in 1170 rather than 1270, 1370 or 1970? Franklin set hers at the time and in the place where the slander arose that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes. Henry’s motive for wanting to solve the case is not just plausible, but plausible historically.

I can think of one other author whose historical crime fiction similarly seems perfectly suited to its period: Carlo Lucarelli. What about you, readers? What historical crime fiction is not just a good read, but could not have been set in any other period?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Mistress of the Art of Death, question for the consideration of readers

How does an author of historical crime fiction avoid a jarring clash between the sensibilities of the time depicted and those of the time in which he or she writes? Ariana Franklin attacks the issue from the beginning of Mistress of the Art of Death, observing a group of pilgrims returning from Canterbury in 1171 wearing rich tokens of the martyred Thomas Becket and observing that "the Canterbury monks must be raking it in" – but leaving it for readers to reflect, as she clearly wishes them to, on the irony of the church scapegoating Jews for, among other things, alleged greed.

The title character, Adelia Aguilar, is a doctor from Salerno summoned to Cambridge by King Henry II to investigate the mutilation murders of a series of children. As was often the case in England in that period, the local Jews are accused of the crimes.

This displeases Henry, for whom England's Jews are a considerable source of tax revenue. With forensic pathologists in short supply, he sends to a more enlightened realm for a master of the art of death, a physician to whom the bodies of the young victims will yield up their secrets and reveal the truth about who killed them. But instead of a master, the King of Sicily sends a mistress. Adelia's difficulties practicing her art in a country where female physicians are unheard of are a recurring motif, and not just at the hand of the novel's benighted Christians. The chief of Cambridge's Jewish community refuses to allow her into the room where a dead man lies, forcing her to send male helpers into the room to report on the body's condition and carry out an examination at second hand, according to her instructions.

Adelia, an outsider in several ways, is Franklin's mouthpiece for commenting on unfortunate (and fortunate) aspects of twelfth-century English society, and it is a mark of Franklin's ability to spin an entertaining story that she does not hit readers over the head with her modern attitudes too often. She manages this, in part, by rendering a convincing picture of twelfth-cenury Cambridge, sights, sounds, smells included. And, when she uncovers the truth about the murders, the killers' motives seem thoroughly contemporary. But why not? Just because certain depravities were beyond the power of those not involved in them to imagine does not mean they didn't happen, or that "good" people did not perpetrate them.

And now, readers, think of historical crime fiction you've read. How does the author manage the difficult feat of combining contemporary perspective and historical setting into a story that works? Is he or she able to make the setting both convincing and accessible?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Ariana Franklin
medieval mysteries
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