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The historical record of Tudor England has long been recognised as a fruitful scavenging ground for writers of crime fiction. From Walter Scott's Kenilworth, which builds up to the death of Lady Amy Robsart, clandestine bride of Robert Leicester, Earl of Dudley -- the over-reacher who aspired to be the husband of Queen Elizabeth I -- to more recent creative reconstructions of events leading to the death of playwright, enfant terrible, and probable government agent Christopher Marlowe, writers have capitalised on this era's most iconic still-unsolved mysteries. In most variations, political intrigue causes the deaths of Lady Amy and Marlowe. In a fresh departure from this tradition, the American writer Kathy Lynn Emerson's Tudor period mysteries focus on the details of domestic life, as experienced by amateur sleuths Lady Susanna Appleton and her friend and sometime lover Nicholas Baldwin. Details of women's lives and material culture bring Emerson's anthology, MURDER AND OTHER CONFUSIONS, to vivid life. Lady Appleton, the protagonist of most of the stories, is a believable amateur sleuth. After all, in Tudor society, in virtually every profession except that of childbearing, upper-class women could practice only as amateurs. Underneath Lady Appleton's quiet, no-nonsense investigator's persona boils anger at the customs and laws of a society in which her skills are as hidden, though as vital, as a revelatory clue. Her husband, Lord Robert Appleton, brought to her by a regrettable marriage of economic convenience, is a perfect demonstration of the banality of evil. Sensibly, therefore, Emerson keeps him out of sight except when he is making a problem of himself. Several of these stories are riveting, creative, and humorous. I particularly liked Much Ado About Murder and Lady Appleton and the Cripplegate Chrisoms. In the first of these, Lady Appleton teams up with visiting Paduan houseguest Lady Beatrice Benedick. It's nice to imagine that after her marriage, Shakespeare's resourceful heroine and acid wit might have continued to use her mental faculties -- and never learned to play by anybody else's rules, including those of English law. Cripplegate Chrisoms is a heavier tale. In it, a compelling cast of secondary characters deal with Elizabethan sexual hypocrisy, religious fundamentalism, infanticide, and potentially murderous misogyny. The denouement of that tale involves some action writing stylistically reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas's prose fiction yet riveting in its own right. At this tale's conclusion, the problems with which it began linger to bother the reader. An additional treasure of this anthology is the author's brief afterwords to each of the stories. Some of these notes clarify the trivia of history and cultural anthropology upon which Emerson fashioned her tale. Others reveal details of Emerson's writing processes that readers who are also writers will surely find inspirational. A few of the tales do not benefit from being collected together, as some are short on plot but stronger in Emerson's characterisation of Lady Appleton, her servingwoman Jennet, and Baldwin. Because no story requires prior familiarity with the series, the constant introduction of the characters can become repetitive. Another slightly aggravating elements of these tales is Emerson's simplification of early modern Christian Europe's sectarian conflicts. Most if not all of the sympathetic characters in this collection are Anglicans. In other words, today's state church is Lady Appleton's choice: she even runs an underground railroad for Protestant would-be emigres during the Marian years, in spite of her politique husband. Like Catholicism, Puritanism is portrayed explicitly as an extreme which enables unequivocally evil behaviours, and the Muslim characters Baldwin meets on his mercantile travels in Persia are two-dimensional and childishly impressionable. "Last night," a Persian tells Baldwin, alluding to his arrival in Persia, "the shah, who sets great store by such things, dreamt of the coming of a poet who would make right a wrong and tell of it in a verse." This situation, in which the Christian man's coming to a non-Christian realm is superstitiously anticipated as the coming of a saviour, suggests the legend of Pizzarro's reception by Atahuallpa, doomed last ruler of Incan Peru. Having given Lord and Lady Appleton an estate which clearly belonged to the more politically hapless prior to the dissolution of the monasteries, Emerson must know that 16th century religious political struggles had no clear heroes or villains. Lastly, both the dialogue and the third-person narration of these stories include a great deal of stereotypical "olde English" vocabulary. Terms such as "gramercy", "naught but . . . ", "mayhap" and "certes" jar oddly with more modern language, making it seem as if the characters are speaking two languages at once. Early modern print English (for who knows how people actually spoke their vernacular in that time?) is a different dialect from anything spoken today. Emerson's compromise comes across sounding as if she has translated only half of what her characters think and say from their dialect into her own, and makes the slippage between nostalgic cliches of that era's language and our own very conspicuous. Nevertheless, the best stories in this collection are imaginative, innovative, and engaging. Lady Appleton and her tumultuous world are well worth getting to know.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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