Rebellion in the Shadows

"I am a man... and therefore have all devils in my heart."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Hammer of God," collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

I attempted to take a break from the locked room mystery, which has been dominating this blog more than usual, but Ellis Peters' One Corpse Too Many (1979) failed to hold my attention and bailed on the book – swapping it for a historical detective novel by Paul Doherty. However, the title in question turned out to be a cornucopia of miracle crimes!

The Anger of God (1993) is the fourth entry in "The Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan" and was originally published as by "Paul Harding," which takes place during the warm summer days of 1379.

A "mere child," Richard II, sits on the throne of England, but power "rested in the grasping hands" of his uncle, the Regent, John of Gaunt. The Regent seems to be unable to bring peace and stability to the troubled Kingdom: French galleys were raiding towns along the Channel coast, while the Scots were terrorizing in the border towns in the North and the peasant class, "taxed to the hilt," were plotting bloody rebellion – referring to themselves as the Great Community of the Realm. A secret society operating under the leadership of a shadowy, cowled figure known only as Ira Dei (Anger of God).

John of Gaunt countered these potential threats by attempting to unite the warring factions of the wealthy, London-based Guilds. As a token of their goodwill and support of the regent, the merchant princes each placed an ingot of gold in a specially constructed, iron-bound treasure chest with six separate locks. Only they, as a group, can open the chest with their personalized set of keys. Or so they assumed.

The fragile alliance between the Regent and the Guildmasters is placed in jeopardy by a string of seemingly impossible murders and the inexplicable disappearance of the gold ingots from the locked, iron-bound chest, which were replaced by a letter stating the bars were taken, as a tax, by the Great Community – signed by Ira Dei. But the problems don't end there for the beleaguered Regent.

One of London's most feared Sheriffs, Sir Gerald Mountjoy, was found stabbed to death in his enclosed garden, guarded by two vicious dogs, but the murderer managed to do this without being seen by the victim or rousing the dogs. Something that seems next to impossible. An equally baffling stabbing occurs, halfway through the book, when someone witnesses the murder of a locksmith. However, the witness failed to observe the assassin who delivered the fatal knife-blow.

And wedged between those two stabbings, there's a poisoning during a royal banquet, where the King and Regent were present, but the problem is that the poisoned Guildmaster ate the same food as everyone else sitting at the circle of tables – raising the question how a deadly poison could have been administrated.

Sir John Cranston, King's Coroner in London, has a full plate with all of these miraculous murders and impossible thefts, but he also has a personal problem occupying his mind. One of his old comrades in arms, Sir Oliver Ingham, prophesied his own death by the hand of his young wife and asked Cranston to bring her to justice in case of his untimely demise. There is, however, one problem: the body is bare of any marks of violence and no trace of poison is found. Nevertheless, Cranston is convinced his old friend was foully murdered and swears his killer will "dance at Smithfield on the end of a rope."

Meanwhile, Brother Athelstan, the Parish Priest of St. Erconwald's in Southwark and Cranston's secretarius, has to contend with a case of demonic possession among his flock. A young woman is apparently possessed by a malevolent entity who accuses her father and stepmother of having poisoned her mother with red arsenic, which is a very specific accusation.

Oh, and there's one more plot-thread: someone was filching the amputated limbs and severed heads of executed criminals and traitors, which were displayed on spikes above the London Bridge as a stern warning. So snatching these body parts can be considered a grievous insult to the laws of the land.

You can say that the plot of The Anger of God is as loaded as a musket packed to the muzzle with black powder, scrap-iron and ball shot. Surprisingly, the plot still comes across as very lean and comprehensible. And the reason for this is both a strength and a weakness of the book.

All but one of the answers provided to the various problems were simple, uncomplicated explanations, which ensured the events depicted in the tapestry of plot-threads were easy to follow. On the other hand, some of the plot-threads, such as the demonic possession and the stolen body-parts, turned out to be so slender and inconsequential that they should have been cut from the book – while the plot-thread about the murder of Sir Oliver should have been written as a separate (short) story. The central idea behind this story had legs, but was completely buried under the other material of the overall plot.

So, what we're left with are the impossibilities, which were, by and large, nicely done with the sole exception of the theft of the gold ingots, which was a cheat. The explanation for the impossible poisoning at the royal banquet probably won't leave you absolute thunderstruck with surprise, but the method has an elegant simplicity that is strengthened by the backdrop of the murder. One really complemented the other.

Lastly, there's the assailant who knifed two people without being observed by an eyewitness or alarming a couple of vicious guard dogs. The gimmick behind these two stabbings is a bit more involved and tricky, but the experienced armchair detective will have no trouble, whatsoever, in figuring out how it was done – since the trick is a slight variation on an old, well-established ploy. However, it was nicely put to use here and (once again) fitted the backdrop (i.e. time-period) of the story. 

 

So, you can argue that Doherty attempted to cram too much into the plot, but can that really be deemed a drawback? After all, The Anger of God was published in the early 1990s, which is a period in the genre when detective stories sorely needed some plot density. Doherty provided that in spates! In any case, the plot-packed book made for an engaging read that always had something on hand to throw at the reader. And that's something you can't help but appreciate.

All in all, The Anger of God does not reach the same heights as some of Doherty's absolute best (locked room) novels, but it is a busy, immersive detective story set during an tumultuous period in (English) history.

On a final note, I found a promising detective novel (without an impossible crime) for my next read. So that break mentioned at the start of this blog-post is coming. So don't even dare to think about touching that dial! 

Dark Deeds

"Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical."

- Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292)

The Magician's Death (2004) is Paul Doherty's fourteenth mystery novel in his flagship series about Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal of Edward I of England, who finds himself at the heart of a conspiratorial intrigue of the royal courts of both England and France. One that centers on an encoded manuscript by the enigmatic Franciscan friar and philosopher, Roger Bacon.

The "beloved cousin" and internal rival of Edward of England, Philip IV of France, maneuvered the English monarch into signing the Treaty of Paris, which he accomplished by putting a great amount of international pressure on the English – backed by the powerful papacy. Philip IV wants to absorb the wine-rich province of Gascony in south-west France, still under English rule, into "the Capetian patrimony" and see his unborn grandson crowned as King of England at Westminster. One of the promises Edward had to make in the treaty is that his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, would marry Philip's sole daughter.

So, one day, the grandson of Philip of France would be wearing "the crown of the Confessor," his daughter will be Queen of England and "her second son will be Duke of Gascony." As to be expected, Edward is not very happy with the situation he found himself in and this is the point where fiction takes it over from history.

All of a sudden, Edward began to cultivate an interest in the work of the late Roger Bacon, whose writing told about such magical wonders as "machines" which can “go to the bottom of the sea” or “fly through the air,” carts that can travel without being pulled by oxen and “a black powder” that can create a thunder-like explosion – among many other visions of the future. But one of Friar Roger's most ambitious work is a codes manuscript he wrote in captivity, Secretus Secretorum (Secret of Secrets), in which he revealed, in great detail, all his secret knowledge. The original manuscript went to Paris, while the only copy stayed in England.

So the opening of the book sees two of Corbett's agents, William Bolingbroke and Walter Ufford, attempting to steal the manuscript and smuggle it out of France, but there's a hitch in the plan and one of them dies – other one escaping by the skin of his teeth. As a result, Philip wants a meeting between delegations of both kingdoms to discuss the matter of Friar Roger's manuscript.

Philip requests that, with "the hardship of winter," the conclave takes place in a secure location on the south coast of England. The place chosen is a cold, grim and lonely stronghold, Corfe Castle, which is believed to be "the work of giants" and the surrounding, crescent-shaped forest is believed to be a home for sprites, spirits and the ghosts of the dead. On the open, south-side of the castle is the iron grey sea.

A desolate, but private, place. However, when Sir Hugh Corbett arrives with his retinue, which includes his right-hand man, Ranulf of Newgate, they find a hot-spot of trouble.

The castle has become the hunting grounds of a serial killer: a number of maids have been found, in-and outside the castle walls, with "a crossbow bolt through the heart." And the death-toll keeps rising! A band of outlaws and scavengers, who live in the forest, swear they were not the ones hunting the woman, but they did make vague references to "the horror hanging in the woods." There are also Flemish pirates, a whole swarm of them, packed in herring ships and cogs of war raiding coastal villages in the vicinity of the castle. So that's definitely a problem.

Finally, there's the French envoy: headed by Corbett's arch-rival, Seigneur Amaury de Craon, Keeper of the Secrets of His Most Royal Highness, who's accompanied by several magistri from the University of Paris, but they have the tendency to meet with an unfortunate and sticky end – usually within the confines of a sealed room. One of them has a deadly seizure in his locked bedroom, while another seems to have broken his neck when stumbling down a staircase between two locked doors. A third one is found, with a cracked skull, behind the closed door of a tower room.

French edition

So, the plot of The Magician's Death has enough going for itself and Doherty, as to be expected from such a natural storyteller, knows how to spin a yarn, but, in terms of a detective story, this was one of his weakest efforts. Doherty is usually very consistent in quality, with a smattering of genuinely excellent mystery novels, which (thus far) had only one true disappointment among them, The Assassins of Isis (2004). But this one is not far behind when it comes to being a complete and utter letdown. Coincidentally, they were both published in the same year.

The sub-plot about the serial killings of the maids was a pretty petty affair and basically filler material to pad out the novel, which was resolved and ditched well before the ending. I suppose this plot-thread served its purpose in giving the castle an even more sinister atmosphere, but, in the end, I did not care for it. The locked room murders were, mainly, underwhelming. There is, however, one interesting aspect about them that tied in with an earlier event from the story and provided, somewhat, of a clue (one of the few), but also disqualified the second killing as a locked room. The third came closer to being a proper impossible crime and resembled a medieval version of a certain John Dickson Carr novel, but was never played to full-effect. So, as a locked room fanboy, I was not exactly impressed.

And the marauding pirates were just there to provide the story with some last-minute action by raiding the castle. Robert van Gulik showed in "The Night of the Tiger," from The Monkey of the Tiger (1965), how a place under siege can be an excellent plot-enhancement for a historical detective story, but here it was more of an afterthought. One that was given a link to the main plot-thread, but its sole purpose was to provide some thriller-ish excitement towards the end.

The main plot-thread, concerning the court intrigue, the undecipherable manuscript and the murders of the university scholars, ends equally unsatisfying: the identity of the murderer and the sudden interest in Bacon's work are revealed, but they're not spectacular. And since none of the secrets are deciphered, the ending has a whiff of the unresolved hanging around it. 

 

So, yeah, I hoped this would turn out to be a better detective story, especially after my previous lukewarm reviews of Donald Bayne Hobart's work, but you can blame "Puzzle Doctor" for my selection of The Magician's Death – who called it "outstanding" and "one of Doherty's finest." Obviously, it wasn't.

Hopefully, the next recommendation on my TBR-list, a translated impossible crime novel (of course!), lives up to the hype. In the meantime, allow me to redirect your attention my 2016 best-of list for a whole pile of mystery novels I did enjoy this year.

I'll also try to watch and review the new TV-special of Jonathan Creek one of these days. So stay tuned and, once again, I wish you all the best for 2017. See you all on the other side!

Passio Christi

"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no men has even been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars," from The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Bloodstone (2011) is the eleventh entry in Paul Doherty's "the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan," originally published as by "Paul Harding," which appeared after the series went dormant for nearly a decade, but the ever-prolific Doherty penned six more novels since he pulled his creation from literary limbo – all of them work towards The Great Revolt (2016). I thought this second period in the series seemed like a good place to get reacquainted with Brother Athelstan.

The story takes place during the dark December days of 1380 and opens on the eve of the Feast of St. Damasus I, which takes place during the second week of Advent. So you can chalk Bloodstone down as a Christmas-time mystery, but the spirit of festivities garbed itself in the robes of the proverbial specter at the feast.

Sir Robert Kilverby is comfortably ensconced "in his warm, snug chancery chamber," pine logs were crackling in the mantled hearth and the door bolted from the inside, but even the safe, fortified nature of the room was no security from dark thoughts clouding his mind. The rich merchant was in a lamentable mood: reflecting on the passing of his first wife and regretting his second marriage, which are merely domestic trifles compared to his past sins of a far more serious nature – a grave wrong that made him the custodian of a holy relic.

As a man of wealth, Sir Robert had financed "those depredations in France," which were part of a seemingly never-ending conflict, known now as the Hundred Years' War, but this made him "partly to blame for the theft of that sacred bloodstone." A precious, blood-red ruby, "The Passio Christi," which is said to have miraculously formed out of the blood and sweat of Jesus Christ when he was dying on the cross. The gemstone was the crown jewel of the Abbey of St. Calliste, near Poitiers in France, where it was taken by a notorious band of marauding soldiers.

The Wyvern Company has "a fearsome reputation" as "a deadly, hostile horde from the havens of hells." They were ruthless men of war who had shown "no respect for anything under the sun." During their glory days, these men were the scourge of the French countryside and took everything they desired, "be it a flagon of wine or some plump French wench," but even Holy Mother Church was not spared from their greedy claws – as they scaled the walls and plundered the Abbey of St. Calliste. One of their grand prizes was the sacred bloodstone, the Passio Christi. Officially, they claimed to have found the relic in an abandoned cart, but the crown disputed their claim and ordered the stone to be placed in trust with one its bankers, Sir Richard Kilverby. In exchange, the men of the Wyvern Company would receive a pension out of the coffers of the Royal Exchequer.

So that's how Sir Richard came to be the legal custodian of a stolen relic, but, as of late, he has been repentant about his old sins and bad decisions. The new French Sub-Prior at St. Fulcher, Richer, has warned him about the dangers the possession of the ruby posed to his immortal soul and similar warnings were written down in the Liber Passionis Christi – i.e. The Book of the Passion of Christ. Sir Richard has began making reparations and is determined to deliver the Passio Christie to St. Fulcher, after which he wants to go on a "pilgrimage of reparations" to Rome and Jerusalem, but "some stealthy night-shape" penetrated the secure chamber and delivered earthly revenge. As well as taking the stone from a triple-locked casket.

The death of Sir Richard brings Sir John Cranston, Coroner of London, to the scene of the crime and alongside him is his secretary, Brother Athelstan, who's a Dominican friar and parish priest of St. Erconwald's in Southwark. Athelstan is also the Holmes to Cranston's Watson and usually is the one who finds a path to the solution. One of the many problems facing the friar is having to figure out how poison was introduced into a securely locked and bolted room, which was found to be bare of any traces of toxin. Or how the assassin managed to take the Passio Christi from that same room.

The Nightingale Gallery (1991)

However, this particular locked room was not as difficult to solve as may seem at first. I immediately figured out how the poisoning trick was pulled off, which was practically given away, but also because Doherty recycled this particular artifice from one of his novels from the early 1990s. Luckily, there were more plot-threads and this included one of Doherty's most ingenious locked room murders, but one that was surprisingly underused. It's a trick that should have been used as one of the main plot-threads.

Back at St. Fulcher's, a cowled figure, "cloaked all in black," is targeting the last remaining members of the Wyvern Company: one of them is cut down in the cemetery and another one is gutted along a quayside, but the third one perished in a blazing inferno inside a locked room. The trick for starting this fire was surprisingly clever and deserved more prominence, whether in this book or another, which has its only weakness that Athelstan and Cranston needed outside help to explain the technical nature of the trick. Namely that of an eccentric-looking man, Bartholomew Shoreditch, commonly known as a firedrake "for his skill, knowledge and expertise with all forms of fire," i.e. a pyromaniac with a license! So something fun could have been done with a character like that if this plot-thread had been better utilized.

I should also mention another sub-plot about a gifted painter and talented hangman, a local anchorite, who is haunted by "the ghost of a wicked woman he hanged." The explanation for these ghostly apparitions are, again, fairly easy, but this storyline provided the book with a couple of nicely written, atmospheric and even Carrian set pieces – which added to the overall readability of the book.

Plot-wise, Bloodstone does not rank as one Doherty's absolute bests, but the plot is competent enough to overlook some of its minor shortcomings and the story itself is engagingly written, which showed the author's background as a historian. I think the historical details and the revolt brewing in the background helped a lot in masking some of the plot's shortcomings. So, to cut a long story short, while I have read better from Doherty, I was certainly not left disappointed and kind of want to continue with this insurgence story-arc. But that's something for next year.  

The Ghost of Oedipus

"There is nothing impossible to him who will try."

- Alexander the Great 

A Murder in Thebes (1998) is the second book from a short-lived series by Paul Doherty, originally published under the name of "Anna Apostolou," which he resuscitated in the early 2000s and furthered the series with three more novels – all of them taking place during the historic rise of Alexander the Great. One of the greatest conquerors of the ancient world.

Initially, I wanted to sample one of the three books from the second period of the series. This phase includes such intriguing-sounding entries as The Godless Man (2002) and The Gates of Hell (2003), but in a recent blog-post, entitled "The Impossible Crimes of Paul Doherty," the Puzzle Doctor directed my attention to A Murder in Thebes – saying in his review of the book that "the solution is genuinely clever" and "the locked room is a masterpiece." Well, that got my attention!

So, let's see if this self-professed locked room expert agrees with the diagnosis of the good doctor and one of Doherty's greatest advocates on the web.

In 336 BC, Philip II of Macedon was assassinated and his son, Alexander II, ascended to the throne, but the Greeks and Persians assumed this was the beginning of the end for the Macedonians. A grave mistake! Swiftly, the Greek city-states were forced to submit to the new king, "in a brilliant show of force," after which Alexander marched into the wild mountain region of Thessaly with the intention of bringing its tribes under his dominion.

While he was gone, rumors began to swirl of Alexander's death and how "the vultures were picking the bones of his army," which encouraged the Thebans to rise in rebellion and besieged the small garrison Alexander had stationed in their citadel – a place called the Cadmea. After being forced to return, Alexander sacked the city as a punishment for their treachery: houses, shops, taverns, council chambers and storages were "all reduced to feathery black ash." The stone walls were dragged down and everything worth as much as a sliver of silver was confiscated, which is a nice way of saying the city was plundered. Those who fought back or resisted were killed and everyone else were dragged to the slave pens. All of this is described in a single chapter that opens the book.

The sacking of Thebes further serves as an unusual moody, but effective, backdrop for the busy, intricate plot of the story.

As the remains of the city smolders, Alexander turns his gaze to the Iron Crown of Oedipus, which, legend has it, "only the pure in heart can wear" and "guilty of no crimes against his parents" – which is exactly why he wants to possess it. Alexander is determined that everyone in the land knows he received the blessing of the gods and had no part in the murder of his father. There is, however, one problem: the crown is tightly fastened on top of a stone plinth, inside a holy shrine, with a ditch full of glowing coals, a row of spikes and a snake pit in front of it. So taking the crown from a marble-lined room full of deadly obstacles will take some ingenuity. However, that's not all. 

Before the arrival of Alexander's army, two of the members of the small garrison he had left behind at the citadel were brutally murdered: a lieutenant, Lysander, from Crete was sent as an envoy to talk with the Theban leadership, but he was murdered in the streets and was crucified in front of the citadel. This had a visible effect on one of Alexander's most trusted captains, Memnon, who became frightened and seemed to have committed suicide by jumping from the window of a top-room in the tower of the citadel. After all, the door was locked from the inside and a guard was posted outside of the door. The only living presence in the room was his loyal mastiff, Hercules. So how could a murderer have reached or penetrated this secure, top-floor tower room?

These deaths seem to be the work of a turncoat within the ranks of the small garrison. A person referred to as the Oracle and this traitor "spun his rumors and lies," which eventually lead to the destruction of the town. Understandably, the king wants this spy captured and crucified "for all other traitors to see."

Miriam and Simeon Bartimaeus, brother and sister, previously helped Alexander in quelling a sinister plot, which was recorded in A Murder in Macedon (1997), but now they have to tangle with a dangerous and formidable spy – one who is not afraid to bloody his hands with some dirty work. At the same time, they're also expected to find an explanation for the possible murder in the locked tower room and figure out how to retrieve the crown from the shrine. But there are more problems on the horizon. Yes, this book has a very saturated plot.

Not long after the fall of the city, the whispered rumors begin of sighting of the ghost of Oedipus: who has been seen dragging his swollen foot, blood-encrusted club in hand, around the streets of Thebes. Like one of the Nine Man-Eating Giants from Roald Dahl's The BGF (1982). These terrifying sightings are followed by a string of gruesome murders of Macedonian soldiers and guardsmen: all of them had their heads caved in with a massive club, but appeared to have been unaware of the approaching danger. The murdered did not take them out one-by-one, because they were nearly always killed in groups of two or four at a time. However, they were all taken by complete surprise.

This gives the murders a strong flavor of the impossible and was somewhat reminiscent (in presentation) of the killings of Napoleon's sentries in John Dickson Carr's massively underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955). The explanation for these clubbing-deaths was pretty simple, but it made sense and fitted the plot very well. Luckily, the proposed explanation, which was disappointing, was attempted to be used as a scapegoat by the guilty party. I thought that was a nifty way to employ and redress a false solution.

Doherty sidestepped a similar pitfall with the impossible crime at the citadel's tower: everything seemed to suggest the army captain was scared out of the window, but there was a fiendishly clever, but simple, explanation – which seemed to be completely original as well. It wonderfully explained everything: why the locked door, guard and dog posed no obstacle to the killer. The mood of the victim and how a strong, rugged and old warhorse could so simply be overtaken and flung out of the tower window without a cry. A (minor) work of art!

On top of that, every aspect of the plot is reasonably clued or hinted at. Well, you might not be entirely able to work out how to lift the crown from its plinth, but, otherwise, it is fair enough.  

So, all in all, one of Doherty's better and more interesting historical mysteries, as well as one of his best locked room novels, which plays out against the smoldering remains of a sacked city. That also added to the overall quality of the book. A Murder in Thebes is definitely recommended. 

Outlaws of the Forest

"When as the sheriff of Nothingham

Was come with mickle grief,

He talk'd no good of Robin Hood,

That strong and sturdy thief."
- Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow (Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood: A Collection of the Popular Poems, Songs and Ballads Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw, 1826)

The Assassin in the Greenwood (1993) by Paul Doherty is the seventh entry in his chronicles of Sir Hugh Corbett and takes place in 1302, which was one of those historic, tumultuous period in Europe's history and King Edward I is besieged by problems – such as the expansionist tendencies of France and the return of an infamous outlaw.

A covert war of intelligence, counterintelligence, and espionage is being waged on the continent of Europe. The chess pieces in this war are spies and double-agents, either in the employ of the English or the French, who dance around important crumbs of information pertaining to the situation on France's northern border – where an army is amassing. King Edward's intelligence network is aware they're waiting for the signal "to cross into and destroy the Kingdom of Flanders," but not if these plans extended to England's southern coast.

So it is interest of King Philip IV of France to keep the English in the dark and for this purpose he has dispatched one of his best assassins across the Channel. His target? The Keeper of the Secret Seal and devoted emissary of King Edward I of England, Sir Hugh Corbett. However, Corbett is on a mission himself. A mission that brings him to the dark, dense and dangerous thickets of Sherwood Forest surrounding the castle of Nottingham.

One of the King's principal tax-collectors, Matthew Willoughby, was leading an armed convoy to the forest and they followed a secret route, which went across obscure pathways and tracks, but they were halted by a "volley of arrows" – courtesy of a band of roughly fifty robbers. The iron-bound chests were taken from their covered wagons, the tax-collector was horrible maimed and his entire retinue was massacred.

As shocking as the brutality of this massacre is the identity of the man who acted as the leader of this group of outlaws: an archer clad in Lincoln green who claims to be none other than the legendary thief, Robin Hood! He even has Little John by his side.

King Edward is in a black rage, as he had given the outlaw a King's Pardon in the past, and he has one simple task for Corbett: "go to bloody Nottingham and see Robin Hood hang." But upon his arrival in Nottingham, Corbett discovers that not all of Robin Hood's crimes are simple mugging cases. The Sheriff of Nottingham has passed away under very mysterious and seemingly impossible circumstances inside his chamber.

The body of Sir Eustace Vechey was "in the blackest pit of depression" when he and his manservant, Lecroix, retired to his room, which was locked from the inside and key was left in the lock. There were two guards posted outside of the door and the windows are mere arrow slits. As someone remarked, "not even a rat could squeeze in there," but there must have been an invisible agent in the room to administer a very potent poison to the sheriff – which was not found or tasted in the goblet of wine and pieces of sweet meat that were left in the room.

Doherty is a bit of a specialist where (impossible) poisonings are concerned and the locked room situation, and its explanation, was somewhat reminiscent of the one used in The White Rose Murders (1991), but different enough to stand by itself. It also had a fairly clued explanation and one that you can piece together yourself long before Corbett stumbles to the truth. So that was a nice element of this very eventful novel of thick, braided plot-threads and there are many plot-threads in this book.

First of all, there are the previously mentioned cases of a forest teeming with murderous outlaws and the baffling poisoning of the sheriff, but there's also the question of why Robin Hood has returned and why he has become so cruel. He used to be a champion of the common man (i.e. the poor), but now he seems to be suffering from a severe case of bloodlust. These come on top of a complicated cipher Corbett and Ranulf have to break and an unknown person who shoots three burning arrows over the castle wall on the thirteenth of every month. And then there are the bodies. Doherty has never shied away from stacking up a body count (e.g. The Plague Lord, 2002), but here we have murders, executions and deaths in every single chapter – often more than one body at a time. Death is literally all around Corbett and Ranulf in this one!

One advantage of the bustling plot of The Assassin in the Greenwood is that it makes it a very eventful story, in which the plot is always on the move and events are constantly unfolding. It makes for a very readable story. However, the downside of this is that, to prevent the ending from becoming a convoluted mess, the solution had to be as simple as possible. And that was the case. You don't have to be a particular genius to deduce the identity of the mastermind behind all of this bloody chaos, but, overall, it was competently done and loved the motivation of the killer. It nicely intertwined with the presence and legend of Robin Hood. But the real draw and eye-catcher of this historical mystery is having Robin Hood as one of the main suspects/antagonists.

So, a pretty good, fun and eventful read, but not one of the best entries in the series. I suspect The Demon Archer (1999) was Doherty rewriting this story from scratch and cutting out all of the extraneous matter, because the both stories shares some resemblances, but the plot is a lot leaner and overall better executed – which is a good example that sometimes less is more.

On a final note, Robin Hood seems out-of-time in this novel, because he's typically portrait as a figure from the days of Richard the Lionheart and King John, but Doherty addresses and explains this in author’s note.

A Riddle in Verse

"For murder, though it has no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ."

- William Shakespeare (Hamlet, 1600-02) 

During the first couple of years on this blog, I read a whole slew of historical mystery novels from a very prolific scribbler, Paul Doherty, but the flood was stemmed to a trickle by the rapidly expanding gamut of procurable Golden Age and neo-classical mysteries.

I've read only two of Doherty's historical fancies in just as many years: The Nightingale Gallery (1991) and Song of a Dark Angel (1994). So I thought a return to his work was in order and picked the inaugural novel in what seems like a very promising series. A series that'll see me back before 2017 rolls around!

The White Rose Murders (1991) was the first in a series of six, originally published under the nom-de-plume of "Michael Clynes," which all have the long and descriptive subtitle of "Journal of Sir Roger Shallot" that concerns "certain wicked conspiracies and horrible murders perpetrated in the reign of King Henry VIII" – a premise pregnant with promise and vast possibilities.

Sir Roger Shallot was "born with the quickest wits" and "fastest legs in Christendom," who has probably bedded as many women as a certain Mongolian warlord, but has a profound lack of courage and often took what he could carry. Usually valuables that did not belong to him. Shallot has not led an altogether honorable life, but one that brought him to his ninetieth summer and not everyone was able to reach that pinnacle in the 16th century.

However, in his old days, Shallot has become a haunted man as the "clip-clop of spectral hooves on the peddle-strewn path in front of the manor" herald the ghosts of his pasts as they form an "army of silent witnesses" around his bed – taunting him with jeering cries of being a liar, thief and a coward. Shallot tells the story behind these ghostly faces as he dictates his memoirs to a chaplain in the center of a maze, which protects him from "the importunate pleadings" of his "brood of children" and the "soft footfall of the assassin" from one of the many secret societies who'd like to see him depart from the world. You'll understand why once you learn his story. Shallot has a penchant for landing in trouble and making the occasional enemy on the side.

First of all, The White Rose Murders is an original story that tells of Sir Roger Shallot's humble beginnings: a child born during a time of terror "when the great Sweating Sickness swept into London" and Henry VII reigned over the country, but a life of mischief in bad company nearly condemned him to death by hanging and was saved by an offer to enlist in the King's Army to march against the Scots – where he "hid beneath a wagon until the slaughter had finished" and "came out with the rest of the English Army to claim a great victory." Well, being a "war hero" did not prevent Shallot from a second meeting with the hangman, but this time he was spared by interference of an old and influential school friend, Benjamin Daunbey.

Daunbey is the favorite nephew of Cardinal Wolsey, the ruling scepter in the hand of King Henry VIII, who took Shallot as his manservant and through this connection they become encumbered in a Royal assignment.

A potential deadly chore that began when James IV of Scotland is killed on the battlefield of Flodden and his widow, Queen Margaret, fled to England and had to leave her infant son behind under a Council of Regency. Queen Margaret is the sister of Henry VIII and seeing her restored to the Scottish throne is in the best interest of England, which brings Shallot and Daunbey in the picture: Cardinal Wolsey has imprisoned Alexander Selkirk, "formerly physician to the late King James," to draw information from him that could assist Queen Margaret's return to Scotland and he's suspected of being a member of Les Blancs Sangiers – a secret coven of Yorkist conspirators that plots the overthrow of the Tudor Monarchy. The only obstacle to obtaining this information is the fact that Selkirk's mind has wandered away from him and spends his time writing "doggerel poetry" and staring "blankly at the walls of his cell," which is not very helpful. But he was still considered a danger by some.

One morning, Selkirk's is discovered dead in his prison cell, "brutally murdered by poison," but the question is how the murderer managed to administrate the deadly potion: the door of the chamber was locked and bolted. There were two guards at the foot of the steps and two who stood outside the prisoner's chamber. Guards who tasted every scrap of food and sipped every drop of claret that entered the room without showing any signs of the ill effects of poisoning. The murder room had high-up, arrow-slit windows inside a sheer wall of thirty feet, but these proved minor obstacles to an apparently ghost-like killer who also left white rose on the victim's desk – The White Rose of York and the mark of Les Blancs Sangliers!

Shallot and Daubney find themselves confronted with an entire string of murders, containing a second impossible poisoning in a sealed chamber, which they suspect sprang from the inner-circle of Queen Margaret's household. A suspicion that's confirmed when they join the Queen’s retinue to meet a Scottish envoy to negotiate her return to Scotland, but murder is dogging their every step: from a lush priory and the vile back alleys of London to the City of Paris, which "seethes like a hissing snake" and "full of intrigue, subtle plots and traders who could cheat a beggar out of his skin" – which makes you wonder how Shallot managed to life for nearly a full century.

Doherty handles all of these plot-threads with remarkable skill and strewn about ample clues to many of the proposed mysteries, which were hidden in a scrap of poetry, a cat who refused to die and the embalmed corpse of King James. The locked rooms were handled equally well and the explanations for them were quite acceptable and reasonable. Not the best examples the genre has to offer, but they were still pretty good and poisonings in locked rooms are difficult to pull off convincingly.

I guess the only point I could bring against the plot is that the murderer had nearly dissipated the small pool of suspects by the end of the book, which made this person stand out, but even that compensated by the fact that Daubney suspected the wrong person. You should discover for yourself why that point is important.

However, the most attractive feature of The White Rose Murders is Shallot's delightful narrative, which is often interrupted to rebuke the chaplain for sneering at his cowardice or calling him a hypocrite for condemning his loose morals. Shallot's narrative is also interspersed with such prosperous claims as having met one of the Princes in the Tower (who was supposed to be dead) and having been friends with William Shakespeare!

In summation: The White Rose Murders has a soundly constructed, reasonable clued plot that's wrapped in a grand and amusing narrative, which is told by what's arguably the best character Doherty has created. It's a pity he was abandoned after only six novels, but I still have six of them to go and I'll be eliminating some of them from my TBR-list before the year draws to an end. 

The Journals of Sir Roger Shallot:

The White Rose Murders (1991)
The Poisoned Chalice (1992)
The Grail Murders (1993)
A Brood of Vipers (1994)
The Gallows Murders (1995)
The Relic Murders (1996)