The other day as I was straightening one of our bestselling "face up" tables - our "history mystery" table - I started thinking about what it is that engages so many readers in another time period. I read here and there in history mystery (though I certainly have customers who are far better read than I am) and realized, when I thought about it, that history mysteries are an unparalleled escape because the problems of another time can safely be kept there. The books can thus be enjoyed purely on their own terms. The two godmothers of this particular sub genre are of course Ellis Peters and Anne Perry, with Anne Perry being the writer responsible for ushering in the more "modern" elements of this genre, i.e. character development and atmosphere.
To me, while Ellis Peters certainly writes historical mysteries, she is even more the mistress of the locked room puzzle, her task in a way made easier by the lack of actual police or forensic science in Brother Cadfael’s time. Anne Perry’s dramatic character, the amnesiac William Monk, brought a new freshness to the whole thing. The first book in this series, The Face of a Stranger, is especially memorable. Perry paved the way for other writers like Charles Todd, Jacqueline Winspear, Victoria Thompson, and Rennie Airth. Ultimately - to me at least - some of the students have outpaced the teacher, but there was a time when I was so feverishly caught in Perry’s grip that I called my husband whenever I wasn’t working and demanded that the next Perry volume be brought home to me that very evening.
And why is history mystery so compelling? A large part of it, I think, are the fascinating details of a past life - making the reader wonder, could I have lived like this? Could I have believed this way? How could I have borne such restrictions? The details of daily life brought to light by writers like Lindsey Davis (ancient Rome) and Sharan Newman (medieval France) are so interesting I sometimes don’t actually care about the mystery. These talented writers illuminate another time and place in a way a "mere" historian can’t - it’s easy to imagine walking the streets of Paris with Newman’s Catherine LeVendeur, probably especially because she is made so accessible to the reader by her creator. Especially effective (to me) was Newman’s book The Witch in the Well, became it brought so many different elements of the past to life - what it was like to live in a castle under siege and what it might have been like to have been governed by superstition. It has the elements of a terrific ghost story combined with the elements of a mystery wrapped up in an historical package.
Some history mysteries are more character studies - I think Rennie Airth, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear’s books all fall into this category. All of the characters in these books have been damaged psychologically by WWI and all deal with it differently - Charles Todd’s character has an entirely other person speaking to him inside his head, someone who was killed during the war and has a completely different point of view from series character Inspector Rutledge. Maisie Dobbs, Winspear’s inimitable character, has started her own private detective agency, where the solutions she finds must fit with the needs of her clients. The way Winspear describes it is almost mystical, and I won’t ruin it for you here - you should just read Maisie Dobbs for yourself if you haven’t already. And Rennie Airth’s character has dealt with the war by retreating from the police to become a farmer, but in the second book the looming horror of the next war is already there, and his character will obviously have to deal with it eventually.
And then there are a few modern masters who combine Ellis Peter’s classic puzzles with the setting and character development present readers seem to prefer. I think the main practitioner of this at the moment is Margaret Frazer, whose recent books have combined all these elements with a real brilliance and delicacy that have rarely been matched. Recent Frazer titles The Bastard’s Tale and The Widow’s Tale are real standouts, with The Bastard’s Tale (to me at least) verging on the classic. Two other more recent writers no longer with us, Kate Ross and Bruce Alexander, have that same gift with the puzzle form while still supplying an effective and affective character study. To me, missing Ross’ The Devil in Music is to simply be missing one of the best mysteries of the past 20 years or so. A new writer who might join that distinguished group, on the basis of her first novel, The Conjurer, is Cordelia Frances Biddle. Her depiction of 1842 Philadelphia is completely memorable.
And finally, I think that reading an historical mystery is the ultimate armchair traveling experience. The best writers take you to the past so effectively that finishing one of their books is jarring, because you can’t figure out for a moment what you’re doing in the present. No matter what the time period you find of interest, there’s surely an historical mystery with your name on it.
