Murderous Intersections continued
Peters does a superb job of matching setting to crime. [...] The crimes are
often not only specifically medieval but specific to the month and day. For
example, in A Morbid Taste for Bones [...], two murders [sic]
occur in the attempt to remove a Welsh saint from her rural resting place
to Shrewsbury Abbey in order to increase abbey income and glory by encouraging
pilgrims. This occurs in 1138, the actual historical date of the supposed
removal of Saint Winifred's remains to Shrewsbury Abbey. The murder in One
Corpse Too Many occurs during the documented hanging of ninety-four soldiers
on King Stephen's order following the Siege of Shrewsbury that same year.
Monk's Hood concerns a poisoning by a half-Welsh bastard son who would
be a legitimate heir in his own country. (279)
dith
Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters, was a versatile author. Her works include historical
novels - in particular the Heaven Tree Trilogy and the Brothers
of Gwynedd Quartet, both of which thematize tensions between, and within,
thirteenth-
fter
the Second World War, the mainstream of British detective fiction continued
to be inspired by the "Golden Age" tradition, the patterns of the 1920s and
1930s. As these patterns became exhausted, it was inevitable that new elements
should be introduced. In Peters's case, rather than drawing on recent
developments in the United States or on the Continent, this meant moving
her mysteries to a medieval context: on the one hand a natural step, in view
of her familiarity with the period, which had already figured in her historical
novels; on the other hand a step with problematical implications, since it
has been argued that the detective story is a quintessentially modern genre,
whose form and ideology clash with preindustrial settings. Agatha Christie's
Death Comes as the End (1945), set in ancient Egypt, epitomizes the
problem, telling as it does a story of crime and detection which follows
precisely the same scheme as the Hercule Poirot novels.
ith
the creation of the Cadfael mysteries, Peters played a central role in
establishing a new sub-genre of the detective story. A historical dimension
had of course been experimented with before, not only by Christie but also
for instance by Robert van Gulik, whose Judge Dee series, set in ancient
China, began to be published in 1949. Peters is sometimes seen as belonging
to the Eco tradition, but the invention of Brother Cadfael predates
Il nome della rosa. Moreover, similarities between Peters and
Eco are superficial at best. It is not on Eco's novel, classed as historiographic
metafiction by Linda Hutcheon, but on Peters's series that most of the historical
mysteries published recently, such as Paul Harding's Brother Athelstan stories,
seem to be modelled. The fact that the cult status of Il nome della
rosa has been exploited for the marketing of Peters and her ilk - as
well as for the marketing of Peters criticism (e. g. Greeley) - glosses over
substantial differences of approach.
he
crime plot of Peters's novels largely follows the classical, Golden Age pattern.
A mysterious murder occurs in all three novels in the First Omnibus:
one of the victims is found with an arrow in his heart but later turns out
to have been stabbed; another, who has been strangled, is hidden among the
bodies of men hanged by order of the king; the third is poisoned with an
unguent made by Brother Cadfael himself. In two of the three novels, the
victim has quarrelled with several persons, who are then suspected of his
murder - a suspicion which Cadfael (and, with him, the experienced reader
of mysteries) is quick to reject. In line with what Marty Roth has called
"the paradox of the obvious", the amateur detective questions the evidence
against the assorted suspects precisely because it is bursting with a seemingly
plain meaning, because it points too aggressively in the direction of the
apparent solution (Roth 180). The representatives of the law, on the other
hand, true to the "police paradox", accept the evidence at its face value
(or are forced to accept it by bureaucratic procedure) and therefore fail
in their investigations. As for the real solution, clues are shared with,
and at the same time hidden from, the reader according to the "fair play"
principle. They tend to be given at an early stage, but sparingly. The reader
is enabled to identify the criminal at least as much by genre conventions,
according to which the murderer is one of the main characters but not one
of the obvious suspects, as by genuine clues like a reference to the murderer's
presumed ambition in A Morbid Taste for Bones (12). The detective
himself, having ruled out the obvious suspects mostly on the strength of
intuition, in many cases comes across the main clue by sheer luck, and the
power of observation and deduction which helps him to interpret it correctly
is downplayed rather than emphasized. For example, in A Morbid Taste
for Bones, Cadfael decides that the man publicly accused of murder would
have been incapable of killing by stealth, but fails to discover the real
perpetrator until, accidentally, a woman's hysterical fit provides him with
a clue: noticing that the poppy syrup which he uses to calm her down has
been depleted, he concludes that the murderer, who has the syrup in his
possession but has obviously not consumed it himself, has established an
alibi by dosing a fellow monk. The conclusion is drawn immediately on sight
of the clue, in a single paragraph of free indirect speech which gives the
reader access to Cadfael's thoughts. The process of ratiocination is thus
accorded less importance in Peters than for example in Conan Doyle or Agatha
Christie. Correspondingly, the ending of the Cadfael mysteries is not the
standard closing scene, in which the detective reveals the murderer to an
astonished audience composed mostly of ex-suspects. The fate of the murderer,
excluded in many traditional detective stories, is presented in every case.
The novels close with an account of how those affected by the crime rearrange
their lives and live happily ever after. The detective himself, finally,
resembles many of his famous colleagues in being characterized as eccentric,
as "different"; but while Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot are absolutely,
radically so, Cadfael's difference involves similarity: a monk with a secular,
adventurous past, a Welshman in an English religious order, he has links
with all (male) communities, and for this very reason properly belongs to
none.
he
historical mystery as a sub-genre is produced at the intersection of two
parameters, genre (the detective story) and period (the -- or a -- past).
However, as in the case of the historical romance, which superimposes a
historical element on the love story, interaction between the two factors
is slight - pace Edwin Ernest Christian and Blake Lindsay, who have argued
that
o
argue thus is to confuse trappings with substance. Making a crime "specific
to the month and day" does not automatically make it "specifically medieval",
unless specificity is taken to lie in any link with twelfth-century events.
The crimes listed do not spring from any recognizably medieval discourses
or practices. The murderer in A Morbid Taste for Bones feigns
visions in order to further his ecclesiastical career through the cult of
Saint Winifred; but his crime is only connected with the cult in so far as
he sees that career threatened by the victim. The story woven around the
crime may be called medieval; but the crime itself is not. The hanging in
One Corpse Too Many merely provides a cover-up for a murder planned
independently of it. Monk's-Hood, as Christian and Lindsay indicate
and as we shall attempt to demonstrate in more detail below, has its roots
in the interplay of place and time rather than in time alone, and the medieval
context as such is incidental to the crime. In contrast to the explicitly
ideological approach of Il nome della rosa, for instance, the motives
of the three murderers in The First Cadfael Omnibus, desire for fame,
money and land respectively, conform to the Golden Age pattern in being
represented as strictly personal. In other words, crime in Peters results
from supposed universals of human nature rather than from specifically historical
conditions. Correspondingly, detection follows the line taken by Cadfael's
twentieth-century counterparts. There is nothing medieval about the
above-mentioned mixture of observation, rational argument, luck and intuition
which invariably leads Cadfael to the identification of the murderer. The
historical dimension does affect the crime plot, but only in minor points.
For instance, a trap laid by Cadfael in A Morbid Taste for Bones
is based on the popular belief, significantly enough not shared by Cadfael
himself, that the murdered will bleed when the murderer touches them. The
murderer in One Corpse Too Many is publicly convicted through trial
by combat; but Cadfael's private judgement is expressly said to be independent
of the outcome of the duel (352). Cadfael thus functions as an intermediary
between his contemporaries and Peters's twentieth-century readers. In One
Corpse Too Many, he even turns into an advertiser of history. His reflection
that the murderer Adam Courcelle is "merely a sign of the times" (341) suggests
a close link between a murder committed for personal greed and the backdrop
of the crime plot, the turmoil of the civil war between King Stephen and
the Empress Maud. However, the narrative fails to make clear why, if Courcelle
is a sign of the times, Brother Columbanus in A Morbid Taste for
Bones, who becomes a murderer for the sake of fame and power, is not.
If there is a difference between the two stories, it does not lie in the
murderer's motivation but in the construction of the mystery element. In
contrast to A Morbid Taste for Bones, One Corpse Too Many
does not offer the reader a clearly defined group of (innocent) suspects,
and Courcelle is first identified as the murderer on the strength of nothing
more than a highly ambiguous exclamation (338). To the extent that this
identification is arbitrary - motive and means would fit an indefinite number
of characters besides Courcelle - the narrative does represent the crime
as enabled by society. However, the fact that the society in question is
a twelfth-century one seems accidental.
back