The Great Revolt (2016) by Paul Doherty

I'm an idiot and chronologically challenged! Back in 2016, I read Paul Doherty's Bloodstone (2011), a book reviving the Brother Athelstan series, which had lain dormant since The House of Shadows (2003) and Doherty began to work prodigiously towards the Great Uprising of 1381 – the major story-arc of the series. I told in my 2018 review of The Straw Men (2013) that it was my intention to read these new novels in chronological order, but, as you probably noticed, the previous review was of The Herald of Hell (2015). There are two novels between The Straw Men and The Herald of Hell, Candle Flame (2014) and The Book of Fires (2015). Somehow, I had already crossed them off the list in my mind. Why? Because I'm an idiot, that's why. You can jeer and mock me in the comments.

The Great Revolt (2016) is the sixteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, set in June, 1831, when the Great Community of the Realm and the Upright Men began their bloody purge of London.

Brother Athelstan is at the mother house of the Dominican order, Blackfriars, where he had been summoned to provide assistance to a papal envoy. The boy-king, Richard II, had returned from a pilgrimage to the tomb of his great-grand father, Edward II, with the conviction his ancestor was a saint and a royal martyr – "a true martyr king" like "other saintly monarchs" in "the misty history of the English crown." So he petitioned "the Holy Father for the formal opening of the process for the beatification and canonisation of Edward II" and since Urban VI has a rival pope, Clement VII, residing in Avignon, which makes it desirable for Rome not to alienate the English crown. Athelstan is asked to help gather evidence in favor of canonization of Edward II, but that's easier said than done. Edward II was a divisive monarch with evidence suggesting the deposed king had been freed and fled to the continent, which would be embarrassing for both King Richard and the Pope. And are the 54-year-old secrets worth keeping to the point of murder?

One of the papal envoys, Brother Alberic, collected evidence against the dead king's reputation in his role as advocatus diaboli (devil's advocate), but when the story open, the door to his room is being battered down. A room with only a very narrow, lancet window and a heavy, elmwood door securely locked and bolted from within, but Alberic had been "brutally stabbed" with "an ancient-looking dagger" nobody recognizes. Even stranger is that Alberic was a former soldier, still young and vigorous, but there's no sign or "even a scratch of any struggle or challenge." Alberic is not the last to die violently on consecrated ground of Blackfriars.

You shouldn't expect too much from the locked room-trick, because it's based on a simple idea that has been explored before, but it was put to good use here and the reason why there wasn't any signs of a struggle was genuinely clever and a splendid hint to the identity of the elusive assassin. Just like Steve, the Puzzle Doctor, something "I haven't seen before." This portion of the plot is basically a historical mystery within a historical mystery, linking the tumultuous events of 1327 and 1381, which proved to be tapestry of long-held, treasured secrets and bloody murder – set against a background resembling the end of days. Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, move back and forth between Blackfriars and London.

The footmen of the Upright Men, the Earthworms, were out in full force and directed the grisly
executions and feel slightly guilty for snickering at the lively crowd heckling the unsteady, piss drunk executioners gruesomely botching a beheading as "butter-fingered fumblers." How can you not love the English? But as the revolt drew on, the bloodshed was used to settle old scores and attack the vulnerable as the streets were littered with corpses knifed, garroted or dangling from ropes. So wherever they went there were torn down walls, shredded gates and fences, burning houses and "summary execution at different places along the way." Everywhere they passed where "scaffolds, gibbets and gallows festooned with corpses" or "decorated with bloody body parts and severed heads." Even by Doherty's own standards, The Great Revolt has an incredibly stacked bodycount.

But while they're deep into enemy territory, surrounded by

anarchy and murder, Athelstan and Sir John have their concerns. Sir John wants to be with King Richard when the time comes to meet the rebels and their mysterious leader, Wat Tyler, while Athelstan is deeply concerned about his parishioners. Most of them were taken prisoner and spirited away before the violence erupted, but one of them, Pernel the Fleming, was drowned and her house torched. She may have had a connection to one of the people currently sheltering at Blackfriars. Athelstan also worried about his non-human friends such as his old horse and that wily, one-eyed tomcat, Bonaventure, who had been "his constant dining companion" and credited the cat with "more wit and sense than all his parishioners put together."

So, needless to say, The Great Revolt is an eventful novel in which Doherty took some creative liberties in tying together his fictitious plot-threads with the historical accounts of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the death of Edward II, which he acknowledged in his Author's Note. But, to quote Doherty, historical novels "often reflect a reality based firmly on fact rather than fiction." I think The Great Revolt succeeded in being both an engrossing historical novel and a well done detective story. Definitely recommended!

By the way, how amazing would it be if Doherty's detective fiction was actually history. Just imagine our history books littered with accounts of Egyptian judges, royal clerks and Dominican friars solving locked room murders, dying messages, complicated ciphers and hounding ancient serial killers.

The Herald of Hell (2015) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The Herald of Hell (2015) is the fifteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, originally published as by "Paul Harding," which takes place in May, 1381, as "the day of the Great Slaughter" of the Upright Men dawned and "the flame of rebellion would burst out" – a period when conspiracies, fear and murder engulfed London. The Herald of Hell is the mysterious envoy of the Upright Men who "appears at all hours of night outside the lodgings of loyal servants to the crown" to intimidate and threaten them with doggerel verses. But the Herald is the least of Brother Athelstan's problem.

John of Gaunt, self-styled regent, protector and uncle of the boy-king, Richard II, has designs of his own with his Master of Secrets, Thibault, secretly meeting with one of the leaders of the Upright Men, Wat Tyler. What they have to say to each other is plain treason concerning the fate of Richard II and an enigmatic cipher, which was seized from one of the Upright Men's courier, Reynard. Only thing that was missing was the alphabet, or key, to decipher the message. Something even the cruel, tortuous interrogations of the time had failed to bring forth. 

Master Thibault allowed Reynard to recover in Newgate with "the opportunity to reflect and mend his ways," which could net him a full pardon from John of Gaunt. And, in the meanwhile, Master Thibault tasked Amaury Whitfield with breaking the cipher. This is where carefully laid plans slowly begin to unravel on all sides.

Amaury Whitfield is a clerk of the secret chancery and skilled in cryptic writing, but recently, he began to understand how far the web stretched and a nighttime visit from the Herald of Hell impelled him, under the cover boon days, to flee to the Golden Oliphant – Southwark's most notorious brothel. There he attended with his minion, Oliver Lebarge, the Festival of Cokayne. But, on the morning following the festivities, Whitfield failed to emerge from his room and the door had to broken down with a battering ram. Inside they find Whitefield dangling from a rope which had been lashed to a lantern hook on the ceiling beam! The key was still on the inside of the lock, eyelet covered, while the windows shutters were closed and barred. The room is situated at the top of the house and overlooked, besides a sheer drop, a garden where guard dogs roam at night. So how could have been anything but suicide?

A highly agitated Master Thibault officially commissions Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, and his secretarius, Brother Athelstan, to investigate the mysteries at the Golden Oliphant. And to unlock the cipher.

The brothel proves to be a hotbed of murder, treachery and intrigue with a second cipher to a long-lost treasure, the Cross of Lothar, the presence of a spy of the Upright Men and a second, quasi-impossible murder late in the story when one the characters tumbles down the steep, narrow staircase – which is still a fraction of what happens in this 200-page novel. Doherty ensures his reader is never bored with his characters constantly plotting, and counter plotting, or dragging cartloads of corpses across its pages. Something is always happening and "everything is connected" like "beads on a string."

One aspect I deeply admire about Doherty's best detective novels is how they're written as historical epics without diluting the detective story elements, such as A Murder in Thebes (1998), which is a trick he repeated in The Herald of Hell. While treason is plotted and the Earthworms, foot soldiers of the Upright Men, openly roamed the city and intervened in executions, the attention on the Golden Oliphant remained tight and focused without making it feel isolated. The solution to this portion of the story is excellent with the events at the Golden Oliphant best described as a Golden Age-style locked room mystery transplanted to 1381.

The first locked room-trick is a variation on an age-old trick and how it was done is easy enough to figure out, but the small variation successfully blinded me about another key aspect of the solution. Second, quasi-impossible murder has an equal simplistic explanation, but the aim of that trick was to create the kind of alibi you would expect to find in a Christopher Bush novel. 

Naturally, there much more to the plot with many moving parts and additional corpses, such as the treasure hunt, ciphers and the personal challenges and dangers the friar has to face before he could move towards "a logical conclusion to a most vexatious problem" – reconstructed, piece by piece, during a lengthy exposition. Something that was necessary to tie everything together, but certainly didn't detract from the overall story. The book ends on a kind of cliffhanger that will be concluded in The Great Revolt (2016), which very likely going to be my next read.

So, all things considered, Doherty has plotted better locked room mysteries, but The Herald of Hell is one of his better historical novels in which he seamlessly blended historical events with pure fiction. Highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: The Herald of Hell is a crossover novel by stealth! One of the places that plays a role in the story is a church, St. Mary Le Bowe, where a hundred years ago a Laurence Duket had fled to for sanctuary. The church was "locked and sealed for the night," but, when it was unlocked the following morning, the priest found Duket hanging from a wall bracket and "the King sent a royal clerk to investigate." I knew this sounded familiar, and yes, it turns out this is a reference to the first Hugh Corbett novel, Satan in St. Mary (1986)! Unfortunately, it spoiled the name of the murderer, but to have iron-clad proof of Athelstan and Corbett living in different timelines of the same fictitious universe is the stuff of fandoms!

The House of the Red Slayer (1992) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The House of the Red Slayer (1992) is the second novel in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, originally published as by "Paul Harding," which opens with a prologue, set in 1362, showing Moorish pirates capturing a carrack in the Middle Sea and massacring the passengers – pilgrims, merchants, travelers and tinkers. A gruesome, long-forgotten episode that would nonetheless lead to more bloodshed nearly two decades later.

A "murderously cold" wind swept over London in December, 1377, which despite the ice and hail is supposed to be "a time of innocence and warmth," but Sir Ralph Whitton, Constable of the Tower of London, exchanged his comfortable quarter for a grim cell in the North Bastion tower. The stairway to the room is guarded by two trusted retainers with the door between the steps and the passageway securely locked. Sir Ralph and his guards are the only people with keys to the doors.

The reason for these security measures is that Sir Ralph receives "a drawing of a three-masted cog" together with "a flat sesame seed cake," which frightened him enough to lock himself up. Sir Ralph also doubled the wages of his guards and insisted that visitors be searched, but the moat underneath the tower window became frozen solid – opening a pathway to his assassin. An assassin who climbed the wall using the footholds cut into the tower, prized open the wooden shutters with a dagger and killed the sleeping Sir Ralph. A possible matter of treason that brings Sir John Cranston, Lord Coroner of London, to the Tower of London with his scribe, Brother Athelstan.

The House of the Red Slayer is surprisingly conventionally-structured during most of the first half of the story with Sir Ralph's family-and social circle filling the small pool of suspects.

There's his daughter, Philippa, who's betrothed to Geoffrey Parchmeiner. A young man who enjoyed the approval and trust of his prospective father-in-law. A brother, Sir Fulke Whitton, who can expect to inherit a chunk of his estate. A mute Moorish servant, Rastani, whose conversion to Christianity is doubted and has a reason to harbor a grudge against his master. Gilbert Colebrooke is his disgruntled lieutenant and wanted Sir Ralph's post for himself. A chaplain, William Hammond, whom Sir Ralph "caught selling food stocks from the Tower stores." Finally, there are two friends of Sir Ralph, Sir Gerard Mowbray and Sir Brian Fitzormonde, who are now hospitaller knights, but served with Sir Ralph in Egypt.

So most of the first half of the story is told as a traditional, Golden Age-style detective story with its focus primarily on the mysterious murder in the tower room and there only two, very minor, subplots dangling in the background – concerning Cranston's marital problems and the desecration of Athelstan's churchyard. The Great Community is "plotting treason and rebellion" in the shadows, but these plot-strands barely have a presence.

Doherty is a cruel God who cannot be appeased, or satisfied, with a single, measly corpse and the wholesale bloodletting in the prologue proved to have been the soup severed before the meal.

A second victim slipped from a parapet and spattered his brains on the sharp, icy cobbles below, which coincided with the sounding of the tocsin bell, but that "great brass tongue only tolled when the Tower was under attack." Something that was not the case and when the soldiers went to investigate, they found only "the claw marks of the ravens" in the snow surrounding the bell! A minor impossibility of the no-footprints variety with a simple, but good, explanation. After this second murderer stops being subtly and the murders that follow are even by Doherty's standard savagely brutal and gory, which is underlined by his unfurnished depiction of the times.

Doherty doesn't romanticize the past and has no problem with the showing the stinking streets, the heaps of human waste and the unwashed masses or how the frost tortured the wandering lepers and slaying beggars huddled in their rags – while the blackened corpses of river pirates hung picturesquely from the low scaffolds. And remember that this is supposed to be a Christmas-themed mystery novel!

Regrettably, The House of the Red Slayer is a better historical novel than a detective story, because the murderer is not is difficult to spot or hard to figure out who this person was in the prologue and motivated this person. But it was admirable the way in which Doherty tried to misdirect the reader by presenting one of the murders in a very different light than you would expect from him, but that's what immediately aroused my suspicion. Once you look at that murder as a [redacted], there's only one person who could have done it. So, yeah, I didn't reach the same conclusion as Brother Athelstan with a dazzling piece of armchair reasoning, but the scant clueing made that nigh impossible anyway.

The House of the Red Slayer is one of those Doherty novels that is strong on historical content and writing, but have weak clueing and a plot that is easy to pick apart. So not the strongest title in the series, but, as a historical novel presented as a detective story, it's a very immersive read and the idea to "camouflage" one of the murders was a genuinely clever touch. Even if it can give the whole game away to a reader who has consumed an unholy amount of detective fiction.

The Gates of Hell (2003) by Paul Doherty

Last year, I tackled the first two parts of Paul Doherty's historical "Telamon Triology," The House of Death (2001) and The Godless Man (2002), which takes place in 334 BC and follows the tribulations of a talented young physician, Telamon – who's the trusted confident of his boyhood friend, Alexander the Great. Alexander and Telamon were raised together, as boys, "in the Grove of Mieza at Aristotle's academy," but Alexander's god-like aspirations ensures an endless supply of challenges for the level-headed physician.

The red-thread running through this trilogy is the escalating war activities between Macedon and the sprawling Persian Empire of Darius III.

Alexander has captured or sacked city after city and has crossed into Asia, but Darius III and his menacing spy, Lord Mithra, have been plotting his downfall and even enlisted a Greek mercenary, Menno of Rhodes. One of the few generals to have defeated Macedonian troops in battle. Persian assassins and spies have been active in Macedonian army camps (The House of Death) and captured cities (The Godless Man), which resulted in a bloody trail of revenge, intrigue and miraculous murders dragged across Alexander's marching route "to the edge of the world" – solved by the agile mind of Telamon. Lion of Macedon was now poised to take "the great prize."

The Gates of Hell (2003) is the final book of the "Telamon Triology" and Alexander has set his sight on the city of Halicarnassus with its deep harbor on the Aegean. If the city falls, every sea port on the Aegean will be Alexander. Something that's easier said than done.

Halicarnassus is well fortified with "towers, walls and citadels" with its southern line "protected by the sea and the Persian navy." A moat has been dug around the city "twenty-five feet broad and very deep," which Alexander has to cross before he can attack the walls, but the conditions outside the walls are extremely unfavorable to an invading army and it's "almost impossible to mine underneath" – making the city practically unconquerable without an Archilles' Heel. Well, if a legend is to be believed, there's a weak spot in the city's defensive bulwark.

Pythias was a sour, embittered, but brilliant, mathematician who claimed King Pixadorus, of Halicarnassus, had "cheated him out of certain treasure," but Pixadorus dismissed these accusations as nonsense. After a while, the king grew tired of accusations and threatened to seize Pythias' wealth. So he fled the city, but left behind a cipher, known as the Pythian Manuscript, which revealed both where the treasure was hidden and "an intrinsic flaw" in one section of the city wall. A "terrible weakness" any besieger could exploit. Alexander is in possession of the cipher!

Pamenes is a skillful scribe "versed in translating secret codes and ciphers," who's one of scholars laboring on deciphering the Pythian Manuscripy, but he has not emerged from his room. A room known as the Ghost Chamber with creaking floorboards that has inspired ghost stories, but sadly, nothing is done with the room. Anyway, the creaking floorboards is how people in the room below heard the scribe pacing up and down. However, the door remained bolted and there's no answer to the knocking. So the door is battered down and the body of Pamenes is found on the pavement outside, under the open window, with bird seed scattered around him, which suggests an accidental fall, but Telamon suspects foul play – begging the question how a murderer was able to enter or leave a locked room. This is not the only (quasi) impossible situation in the story.

Alexander and Telamon believe there's a spy in their camp who, somehow, has found a way to dispatch incredibly detailed messages with "a richness of information" into the besieged city. The messages must have been incredibly detailed that it's very unlikely, if not impossible, someone shot an arrow with a message attached to it over the city wall.

Doherty has never been squeamish about padding the body count of his stories and The Gates of Hell is no exception.

A cook and his daughter are poisoned. A Cretan archer is murdered a mile from Alexander's camp and the murderer took his bow and arrows. A woman is found strangled to death in the Ghost Chamber, which appeared in the room after it had been searched. This all takes place against the bloody siege of Halicarnassus. Needlessly to say, this really pads the body count of the book and that's not even counting a number of executions.

So this makes for a very eventful and exciting story full with epic battles, spy activities, ciphers and bloodshed, but Doherty is at his best when seamlessly intertwines historical events with the detective story and The Gates of Hell fell a little short of the mark – because there was only one plot-thread that delivered. The method the spy used to dispatch detailed information to the besieged city was beautifully simple. And neatly linked to the cipher. I suppose the cipher could be a good second, if the average reader actually stood a chance at solving it.

However, the solution to the locked room murder of Pamenes was disappointing. I would have been happy with something half as clever as the impossible fall from the locked tower room in A Murder in Thebes (1998), but this locked room-trick was uninspired. It didn't help that the clueing was sparse and the main culprit stood out like a sore thumb.

The Gates of Hell is strong on historical content and a fine example of Doherty's talent to write mystery novels as historical epics, brimming with historical battles, events and figures, but this time with a very middling plot – ending the Telamon Triology on a weak note. So not one of Doherty's most successful historical mysteries.

The Godless Man (2002) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The Godless Man (2002) is the second entry in the Telamon Triology, bookended by The House of Death (2001) and The Gates of Hell (2003), which tracks the ordeals of a talented physician, named Telamon, who acts as one of the "most trusted counselors and confidants" of his childhood friend, Alexander the Great – who were both tutored as boys by Aristotle in the Groves of Mieza. Alexander has a personality and god-like ambitions that tend to be a test to the methodical, level-headed physician.

The Godless Man is set in 336 BC and Alexander has destroyed the Persian armies at the battle of Granicus, capturing city after city, but the hungry Lion of Macedon is on the prowl for a port. So he took the city of Ephesus. A Greek city rife with deep-seethed rivalries, political intrigue and bloodletting.

Ephesus was a vassal of the Persian Empire and the elites of the city, the Oligarchs, supported the Persians, but they faced in strong opposition in the Democrats and their feud is closely-linked to an apparently never-ending string of murders – basically ancient gang warfare. When the city falls to Alexander, the Democrats are given an opportunity to purge the Oligarchs. Men, women and children are dragged to the market square, tried and summary executed. The bodies are stacked high when Alexander puts a stop to the bloodletting, because he wants to leave a peaceful, unified city behind as he marches deeper into enemy territory. There is, however, a problem.

A group of mighty Oligarchs, lead by Demades, took refuge inside a fortified shrine, the Temple of Hercules. A holy sanctuary not even a lynch-mob dared to violate.

Alexander promised the Oligarchs that they were allowed to leave unscathed and "not a hair on their heads would be harmed," but the whole group, including a Macedonian guard, is massacred during their final night inside the shrine and evidence suggests most of the victims were trampled to death – as if a wild horse had entered the shrine and "stamped on each man as he lay asleep." Another body was blackened by fire and the last one appeared to have been scratched to death. However, the most baffling aspect of this veritable holocaust is that the shrine was only guarded by Alexander's soldiers, inside and out, but hermetically sealed.

The Temple of Hercules is an ancient and simple structure: a heavily beamed roof supported by columns on both sides with small windows that are high and narrow. The main entrance is sealed and guarded, while the rear door is bolted from the inside and sealed from the outside with Alexander's insignia in purple blobs of wax. So how could eight men be brutally murdered inside a sealed shrine that was ringed by soldiers?

However, this is not the only impossibility to occur inside the Temple of Hercules on the night of the murders.

The shrine housed a holy relic, a silver vase, which reputedly holds a earthenware jar containing some of the poison which killed Hercules. A poison known as Hydra's Blood. The silver vase is kept on a stone plinth, firmly rooted in a bed of concrete, protected by "a circular pit" of glowing charcoal and the heat from it's quite intense, but, when they entered the temple, the vase was taken from its plinth and moved to a dark recess of the temple – while the bed of charcoal was still glowing. So who and why moved the vase, but, more importantly, how did this person cross the circular pit. On the surface, this impossibility strongly resembles the problem of the stolen crown from A Murder in Thebes (1998), protected by a pit of red-hot charcoal, but The Godless Man had the better solution of the two. I think this was actually the best of the three locked room problems in this story.

A third (impossible) murder occurs very late in the book, when a character apparently hanged himself in a bolted writing room with shuttered windows, but the explanation is pretty basic.

I don't believe the solution to the massacre inside the sealed temple will set any locked room enthusiast on fire, but the trick was better than I anticipated. I found the presence of a uniformed soldier among the victims incredibly suspicious and, when the dark recesses were mentioned, I began to suspect an extra person had been present in the shrine the whole time – clad in the tunic of a Macedonian soldier. This person simply blended in with the guards when they entered the temple to discover the massacre. However, the actual explanation turned out to be a little more involved and slightly more original than my initial idea. I really appreciate that in a locked room mystery.

As you can probably guess by now, this is only a fraction of the overall plot and bodycount. The slaughter of eight men at the temple is supposed to be the work of a Persian spy, The Centaur, who took his name from a society of Ephesian assassins, The Centaurs. The original group had been wiped out, but The Centaur took their bloody mantle and left behind a trail of blood in the city.

A well-known courtesan is murdered along with her porter, maid and a house-guest. An important witness is burned to death in his prison cell and then there's the previously mentioned locked room murder, which was staged as a suicide, but the story also had a sub-plot and involves a face from Alexander's past, Leonidas – an army veteran who loves to drink and dreamed of finding lost treasure. One day, Leonidas is found face down in the dirty pond of the House of Medusa. A gloomy, ghost-infested place of ill-repute. This plot-thread is resolved halfway through the story and the answer unearths yet another mass murder in Ephesus. Telamon is tasked by Alexander with piecing all these puzzles, within puzzles, together.

The Godless Man was far more focused on the plot than The House of Death, which was more of a historical thriller with an origin story, but, while the plot has some good (locked room) ideas, it did not entirely measure up as a proper, fair play detective story. A lack of proper clues made it look as if the murderer was picked at random and made for a slightly underwhelming revelation, but liked all of the impossible crime material. The impossible crimes are, unquestionably, the best bits of the plot. So, on a whole, this was still a good read. However, I can only really recommend it to long-time readers of Doherty and locked room enthusiasts.

The House of Death (2001) by Paul Doherty

Back in 2016, I reviewed Paul Doherty's splendid A Murder in Thebes (1998), originally published as by "Anna Apostolou," which is one of only two titles in a short-lived series that began with A Murder in Macedon (1997) and are set during the rise of Alexander the Great, but Doherty rebooted the series in the early 2000s – penning three additional titles that are collectively known as the Telamon Triology. I'll be looking at these three historical mysteries this month.

There is, however, one difference this time around: I'm not going to read The House of Death (2001), The Godless Man (2002) and The Gates of Hell (2003) back-to-back, but spread them out all over August. My reason for this is that the first entry in this reboot showed that this series probably doesn't lend itself to binge reading. So I'll be interspersing my reading of the Telamon Triology with some mystery novels that have recently been added to the big pile.

This triology (sort of) continues where the previous, two-part series ended and the events from those earlier novels play a not insignificant role in the shadows of The House of Death.

Only difference between the two series is that the detective-characters from the first two novels, Miriam and Simeon Bartimaeus, were replaced by a physician, Telamon, who is a childhood friend of Alexander and they spend their early days together in the Groves of Mieza – where they were both tutored by no less a figure than the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Telamon is a completely fictional characters, but one who was modeled on an actual historical figure, Philip the Doctor, who's associated with Alexander.

The House of Death takes place in the Spring of 334 BC and Alexander the Great has amassed his troops at Sestos, poised to cross the Hellespont, which is the crossroads between Greece and Asia, where he plans to take the sprawling Persian Empire of the King of Kings, Darius III. And march "to the edge of the world" to "win the vindication of the gods."

However, Darius III and Lord Mithra are already plotting the downfall of the Macedonian upstart. General Memnon of Rhodes, a Greek renegade, has been attracted by the Persians to fight Alexander III of Macedon, because they reasoned that "it takes a wolf to fight a wolf," but the Persians also have dangerous spy in the Macedonian camp, "Naiphat" – who's murdering people left and right! Particularly those who are important to Alexander when it comes to entering Asia.

One of Alexander's scout is found at the foot of a cliff with a winged dagger, of Celtic origin, sticking out of his body and a scrap of paper tightly clutched in his dead hand, which had a quote from the Delphic Oracle scrawled on it. Alexander's father had been assassinated with a Celtic dagger and, in combination with the Delphic Oracle, the murderer is obviously aiming at provoking memories, stirring guilt and playing upon Alexander's superstition. An attempt strengthened when two of the murders appear to have been of the impossible variety. 

 

A young handmaid, a Thessalian, who had been send across the Hellespont by her people to go to the city of Troy, in order to appease the goddess Athena, has apparently lost her wits and is brought to Alexander for questioning, but all he can do is hand her over to his friend, Telamon – who treats her with a sleeping drought that will allow her mind and body to rest. And chase out the phantoms. They leave her "in a closely guarded tent" with "its leather sheets lashed tightly together," only a ghost could get through that, but the unknown murderer manages to poison the maiden. This miracle repeated later in the story when Critias, the map-maker, has his throat cut in his tent, which was also guarded and tightly lashed together.

These sealed tent murders have fairly simple explanations and the throat-cutting barely qualifies as an impossible crime, but, simple as it may be, I liked the poisoning-trick. Simple, but workable. Sadly, you can guess where and when the trickery was done, because the identity of the murderer is pretty obvious.

I think the simplistic detective-elements are the only weakness of The House of Death. Doherty rebooted this series and therefore not only had to retell Alexander's story, but also had reintroduce a new series-character, Telamon, who had his own back-story that needed to be told. A second back-story is that of a secondary-character, named Cassandra, who Telamon rescued from the slave pens and took her on as his medical assistance. And then there's the impending battle between Alexander's forces and Memnon's mercenaries.

The House of Death is more of a historical thriller with an origin story at its heart than a proper detective story, but Doherty knows how to spin a yarn around historical events and the result is an engrossing historical novel. So now that the introductions are out of the way, I have good hopes for the last two titles in this series and have read some good things about the second title. I'll get around that one after my next read.

So, yes, this one definitely comes recommended, but only to readers who're already more than familiar with Doherty's work. Readers who are new to him might want to look somewhere else first.

On a final, semi-related note: I seriously suspect A Murder in Thebes and The House of Death might have been (partially) inspired by John Dickson Carr grossly underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955). I think we can safely assume that Doherty is more than aware of Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and Captain Cut-Throat would probably appeal to him the most, because the plot resembles so many of his own historical detective stories (i.e. an enigmatic murderer going around killing soldiers). So I can easily imagine he wanted to give his own spin to the bare bones premise of Captain Cut-Throat.

The Straw Men (2013) by Paul Doherty

The Straw Men (2013) is the twelfth title in Paul Doherty's "the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan," a series of historical mysteries that originally appeared under the name of "Paul Harding," which emerged from a decade-long dormancy with Bloodstone (2011) and a red-thread runs through these novels – culminating in The Great Revolt (2016) of 1381. Normally, I tend to skip through these series without paying too much heed to chronology, but the Great Uprising brewing in the background made me decide to read these later novels in the correct order. You have to respect history.

The Straw Men takes place in January, 1381 and begins when Sir John Cranston, Lord Coroner of London, is waiting with a comitatus of mounted men-at-arms in "the bleak-white wilderness" of winter. Cranston has been tasked with escorting the Flemish allies of the self-styled Regent of England, John of Gaunt, to the Tower of London, but the Flemish have brought a prisoner with them. A hooded woman on horseback with a masked face. As to be expected, this retinue with escort is ambushed by the Upright Men, members of the Great Community of the Realm, who plot "to root up the past" and "build a New Jerusalem by the Thames" – only to fail in their objective. And this is not the only setback the Upright Men suffered.

Brother Athelstan is the parish priest of St. Erconwald's in Southwark, secretarius to Sir John Cranston and is the Father Brown of the 14th century.

Several days after the attack, Cranston fetches Athelstan and asks him to accompany him to a tavern near the Tower of London, called Roundhoop, where he has trapped some of the Upright Men, but they've taken hostages and threaten to fight to the death – unless they can speak with the Dominican friar. Probably to negotiate a safe passage out by river. However, the situation dissolves into a bloodbath and Athelstan can only listen to the dying words of their masked leader ("tell my beloved to continue gleaning"). These last words were not meant as a dying message, but it became one by the end of the story. I thought that was an interesting use of the dying message that I had not seen before.

So the opening of The Straw Men is packed with battles and bloodshed, but all of this was only the prologue. After these events, a murderer begins to stir within the bulwarks of the Tower. The result of this is a handful of seemingly impossible murders!

The first of these miraculous crimes occurs when John of Gaunt is entertaining his guests with his personal troupe of stage actors, known as the Straw Men, when two arrows, out of nowhere, cut down two of the guests as two heads inexplicably appear on stage. However, the unseen loosening of these arrows and planting the severed heads on stage turned out to be more of a quasi-impossibility. But the next impossible murder is a genuine locked room mystery.

One of the Straw Men, Eli, is murdered in a tower room by a crossbow bolt to the face, but the door was "locked and bolted" from the inside, while the eyelet in the door was immovably stuck in place by old-age and the window was tightly shuttered – both from within and without. The solution to this locked room conundrum is not bad at all. It's as simple as it's elegant and deftly combines technical trickery with human psychology to create the illusion of an impossible murder. Even more importantly, it was fairly original in its execution.

There are two more locked room slayings in the second half of the story and they were cleverly linked together: two men are found dead in their respective tower rooms, one room is situated directly above the other, in which one man appeared to have hanged himself and in the room below someone was stabbed to death. The two-pronged solution to these two locked room murders aren't terribly original or have the same level of synergy as The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room from Detective Conan, but liked them nonetheless. They were a nice little extra.

This is still only a fraction of the entire plot. Athelstan and Cranston have to contend with spies, conspirators, political secrets and a litany of gruesome murders. A hangman is brutally slaughtered and an entire family, except for a baby, is wiped out. So you can forgive an overworked Athelstan that only caught sight of the murder long after the reader has identified this person.

Everyone who pays a modicum of attention and has a passing acquaintance with Doherty's detective fiction can spot the murderer long before the end, which is my sole problem with this otherwise solid entry in the series. The Straw Men is a fast-moving, intricately plotted historical detective novel packed with impossible crime that fascinatingly inches closer to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 – only slightly marred by the obvious murderer. I find it fascinating how Doherty is slowly, but surely, shepherding this series towards the Great Revolt and plan on returning to Athelstan sooner rather than later.