Book Wit

The Queen’s Man: A Medieval Mystery by Sharon Kay Penman (1996)

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for stories involving Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her biography has intrigued me since middle school, where I dressed up as her for a history project and made a pretty cool poster board. Eleanor was one of the most powerful women of the middle ages: she participated in the machinations behind two crusades, patronized the arts, supported a revolt against her second husband, and acted as regent when her son when off to fight in the Third Crusade. She married the king of France at 15, obtained an annulment 15 years later, and then married the much younger king of England with whom she had Richard the Lionheart and the infamous Prince John. Strong and intelligent, Eleanor was more than a match for the powerful men surrounding her, standing her ground against conspirators, war, and imprisonment. She captured the heart of my feminist 12-year-old self, which is why I still love reading about her, fiction or non.

The Eleanor in The Queen’s Man is nicely characterized, as is the young hero of the story, the illegitimate Justin de Quincy. De Quincy witnesses the murder of a messenger, and attempts to sleuth out the killer at the Queen’s request. The precarious political situation of the time (Richard has been captured; John is making nefarious plans) makes an excellent setting, and Penman’s deft writing and clear knowledge of the era makes this mystery well thought out to the end.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (2008)

This is a ride, to say the least. It’s the sort of thing you can read in three days, not because it’s fast-paced, but because the mystery is so intriguing you want to see how Larsson will puzzle it all out. Tightly wound and meticulously edited, this novel, while absorbing, was also profoundly disturbing. I’m not squeamish when it comes to tormented psychosexual literature (Carr’s The Alienist is one of my favorite novels, and that has it in spades), but this one doesn’t flinch. The violence isn’t gratuitous, but it creates an omnipresent hum throughout the story so that you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Was it worth it? Yes. But the explicitness is enough to make me hesitate before recommending it to just anyone. 

Dissolution by C. J. Samson (2003)

Ever since I read The Name of the Rose in high school, I’ve had a fixed interest in monastery-set mysteries. The cloistered atmosphere makes an excellent milieu for a detective story. It’s set up much like the grand estates that populate detective novels of the 1920s & 30s where everyone was up at the manor for the weekend and someone just happened to inconveniently die horribly, only at the monastery there is a chapel and it’s supposed to be more of a surprise to see drunken behavior and lasciviousness. 

Samson’s novel plays with this concept by placing his mystery square in the middle of Cromwell’s reign of terror, when monasteries were being shut down and taken over all over England for exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior (and, you know, to repossess their gold). One of Cromwell’s agents has been beheaded in the kitchen at the monastery at Scarnsea and it’s beginning to look like a papist revolution. Fortunately, Matthew Shardlake is on the case here, one of the more affecting and conflicted sleuths I’ve read recently. A humpbacked lawyer, Shardlake must both catch the murderer, rise above the tetchy politics of the era, and deal with his own wavering fealty to Cromwell. It all amounts to a tight, well-researched mystery with fulfilling characters, and the introduction to a series I wouldn’t mind dipping back into.

Last Seen Alive by Dorothy Simpson (1985)

A classic cozy mystery, Simpson’s fifth novel featuring Inspector Luke Thanet fulfills any needs you might have for a charming detective novel that can take the edge off. My edition (pictured above) has “Murder Most British” across the cover, and it is that to a perfect T. The novel features a picturesque town, gossipy neighbors, and very little violence. It’s all quite civilized, until a woman is strangled in her bedroom at a bed and breakfast. Thankfully, Thanet’s humanism and dry wit are there to puzzle it all out.