A Burnable Book gets its time and its crime right

"In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelry
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye ... "
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Bruce Holsinger's crime novel A Burnable Book is full of history. John Gower is its protagonist and narrates parts of it; Chaucer is a central personage; John Hawkwood cuts a figure something like Al Pacino's in the remake of Scarface. Richard II and John of Gaunt figure in the book; the Avignon papacy is invoked. So are Wycliffe, Wat Tyler, Boccaccio, and the Bardi family of Florentine bankers. In short, if you missed the Late Middle Ages, read this book, and you'll catch up.

Holsinger is a scholar. One expects lots of history from him, and the few examples that I fact-checked suggest that he gets his history right. But he gets the atmosphere right, too. Medieval London is a natural setting for hard-boiled crime, with its lawless precincts just outside the city, its cruel masters and mistreated apprentices, its fetid streets, its premature deaths, its maudlyns plying their trade in Gropecunt Lane, and Holsinger describes it vividly and well..

More important for the reader of crime fiction is that he makes of Gower a credible investigator and hard-boiled protagonist without, however, giving him the anachronistic mannerisms of a Philip Marlowe.  (Getting the essence right without slipping into genre cliché has to be one of a historical crime novelist's toughest tasks. The farther back in time the story is set, the greater the pressure on the author to avoid having his or her protagonist do things a modern fictional detective would do. One crime novel with a medieval setting was ruined for me when its otherwise vividly rendered main character turned without warning into Columbo.)

Holsinger gets around this by telling instead of showing. Gower examines in a straightforward manner his role as investigator and in doing so, makes himself both credible in the role and familiar to readers of hard-boiled crime: "If you build your own life around the secret lives of others ... Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well."

The book establishes Gower as temperamental kin to every flawed crime fiction protagonist who exists in a morally compromised world, and Chaucer, the liveliest of all great poets, underlines this nicely, challenging Gower not to be such a stuffed shirt in his own writing: "Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible?"

***

The novel's title refers to a manuscript that falls into the wrong hands, a book so subversive that it deserves burning.  Just as The Canterbury Tales begin in Southwark, a district across the Thames and just outside London in the Middle Ages, significant parts of A Burnable Book are set there. By happy coincidence, I bought my copy of The Canterbury Tales in the old Philadelphia district of Southwark which, like its English namesake, lay outside the city centuries ago but has since been absorbed by it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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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Peter Tremayne's sister act

Not many crime-fiction characters have societies devoted to them; Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma is among those who do.

I've just made my first acquaintance with the good investigating advocate and woman religious of seventh-century Ireland, and it's enough to know that Tremayne is a lively guide to an interesting but remote period of Western history.

How remote? More than a century before the Book of Kells, back to a time and place when Celtic and Roman churches contended for supremacy, when men and women shared abbeys and monastic foundations where they raised their children in the service of God. Ireland stood out at the time not just for its learning, Tremayne writes in a brief historical introduction, but for the opportunities it offered women:

"The Irish laws gave more rights and protection to women than any other western law code at the time or since. Women could, and did, aspire to all offices and professions as co-equals with men. They could be political leaders, command their people in battle as warriors, be physicians, local magistrates, poets, artisans, lawyers and judges. ... Women were protected by laws against sexual harassment; against discrimination; from rape; they had the right of divorce on equal terms ... "

Tremayne, it seems, chose a suitable time and place for a series about a woman religious and dálaigh, or investigating magistrate.

The first in the series, Absolution by Murder, opens in the year 664, with Fidelma and a range of dignitaries arriving for a debate between the Celtic and Roman churches, the famous Synod of Whitby. What better background for a murder mystery than a momentous historical event? And what better opening for a crime story than a group of travelers finding a body hanging from a tree?

"It was not the fact that a man had been hanged on a crossroad tree that caused the small party of travelers to halt. The travelers had become used to witnessing ritual executions and punishments since they had crossed from the land of Rheged into the kingdom of Northumbria. ... The sight of one more unfortunate suspended on a tree no longer troubled them. What had caused the party to draw rein on their mounts, an assortment of horses and mules, was something else."

I'm just two chapters in, but I can see already that Tremayne has an interesting way of handling dialogue. Without resorting to excessive archaisms or grating faux-medieval speak, he gives speakers a slight formality of tone. This adds flavor without hitting the reader over the head. Of course, most of the speakers thus far have been educated ecclesiastics, which could account for the hint of formality.

For some delightfully blunt thoughts from Peter Tremayne, see this interview on Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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