The Templar, the Queen and her Lover - Michael Jecks

 Blimey, turns out it's twelve and a half years since I read Jecks and his Sir Baldwin series.  The last one I read, in the earliest days of this blog, King's Gold, post-dates this one, which is set in 1325, primarily in France, where Sir Baldwin and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, are part of Queen Isabella's security as she tries to negotiate a treaty with her brother, King Charles IV.

The stumbling block is that Charles and Isabella have not been on the best of terms since Isabella told her father Philip IV that the wives of Charles and another brother were promiscuous adulteresses, carrying on their debauches in the infamous Tour de Nesle.   Both wives were put away.   Charles's wife Blanche is still alive in 1325, a prisoner in the squalid Chateau Galliard, the marriage long since annulled.   Charles is about to marry for the third time, a child bride who is also his first cousin.

Isabella has been likewise sidelined in England, because her husband has replaced Piers Gaveston with a new and more demanding lover, Hugh le Despenser.   Despenser wants the mission to France to fail and Isabella to be discredited.   Edward II's former friend and general, Roger Mortimer, is living in Parisian exile.   He is actually not yet the Queen's lover.

As a former Templar, Baldwin himself is in danger in France, Philip IV being the king who destroyed the Temple and burned the leading Templars.   Baldwin wasn't in France at the time but still has a price on his head.   Meanwhile people in the retinue are dying: Enguerrand, Comte de Foix, is killed after an argument with Baldwin; his squire, Robert de Chatillon, is attacked and later murdered; an old soldier associated with Foix and Robert is killed in the first attack.   Before any of this, the garrison at Chateau Galliard, the prison-keepers of the woman who would have been queen, has been wiped out, Blanche herself having disappeared.  The garrison, moreover, comprised men hired by Robert de Chatillon on the orders of Comte Enguerrand.

The mystery is tantalizing and complex.   The book, however, is too long and its structure too fractured.   It would have been better to focus only on what Baldwin and Simon know, experience, or discover.  It was enjoyable enough but, being so splintered, lacked grip.

The Virgin in the Ice - Ellis Peters

This was the sixth Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters, also known as Edith Pargeter, published back in 1982.  Peters was the original author of medieval murder mysteries, a field which has now proliferated into a double sub-genre of history and crime.  I can't remember if Peters came before or after Umberto Eco's overblown In the Name of the Rose.  To my memory they were coeval.  Certainly Peters wrote a lot more of them.

In this story, it is coming up to Christmas 1139, the first year of the Anarchy - "years in which the saints slept" - when the last of the The House of Normandy, Stephen and Matilda, vied for the English crown. Cadfael is called away from Shewsbury to nearby Bromfield to tend a monk who has been beaten and left for dead.  Meanwhile the authorities are searching for a brother and sister, heirs to a great estate, who have gone missing.  And then Cadfael himself finds the titular virgin entombed in a frozen beck.

The plot unfolds smoothly.  The writing tends to the stilted, but I find that preferable to giving historical figures a version of modern speech,  Peters is immersed in her period - a similar period in which she wrote her most significant works as Pargeter (for example, the Brothers of Gwynedd trilogy) and brings it vividly to life.  The villain was fairly obvious by about halfway and the twist at the end which is supposed to make us gasp made me cringe.  Nevertheless, a minor classic of the sub-genre which gave much pleasure.

Templar's Acre - Michael Jecks

The thirty-first, latest, and - for the time being at least - last of Jecks' novels featuring Sir Baldwin, the crusader-turned-coroner.  Actually, Templar's Acre is not a medieval mystery but a prequel in which the teenage Baldwin travels to Outremer to purge his guilt by preserving the city of Acre, the last Christian city in the Holy Land.

I've commented before on this blog that Jecks' attachment to his hero seems to have been weakening.  One recent novel didn't have him appear at all until well into the action.  But here Baldwin is well-served and central.  Jecks knows his stuff and is not afraid to show his knowledge.  The siege is expertly handled, making us feel the tedium of days and nights on the city walls without ever subjecting us to similar tedium.

I enjoyed it hugely and hope Jecks is soon back on home turf.  It will nevertheless be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

City of Fiends - Michael Jecks

City of Fiends is the 31st instalment of the Knights Templar mysteries, which Jecks has been writing since 1995.  Jecks is prolific to the extreme - he writes other series and is a key member of the Medieval Murderers.  Normally, such an output would impact on quality, but City of Fiends is by far the best of the series that I have read.  Recently Jecks has been tempted by the common trap of delaying the entrance of your hero.  Not this time; this time he reminds us of Baldwin before he actually returns to the city (Exeter) and starts sorting out fiends.  By doing so Jecks gets the necessary exposition out of the way and explains one of the key storylines - that this novel takes place during the period when the deposed Edward II was supposedly sprung from Berkeley Castle.  Historically, it is a conspiracy theory, advanced beyond its merits via the internet but it suits Jecks' thirty-one volume narrative perfectly.

There are several murders within the city and some extremely perverse peccadillos.  There is a large cast of supporting characters, richly drawn and clearly distinguished from one another.  Jecks is clever in manipulating our suspicions and he expertly switches our attention from suspect to suspect.  I didn't guess who had really done the crimes, and the unmasking, when it came, was perfectly credible.

I see from Jecks' website that his next novel is a prequel, set before Baldwin's return from the crusades.  I can't wait.  In case I have to, the other good news is that his publishers, Simon & Schuster, are reissuing the entire series from the beginning, three titles a month.

This may be the year Jecks breaks through to the really big time.  On this form, he certainly deserves to.  Hotly recommended.

A Plague of Heretics - Bernard Knight

The fourteenth in the Crowner John series, and Knight is on top form - straight into the action, plague on page 5, heretic on page 8.  The mystery covers both strands and I didn't get the culprit until Knight intended me to.

What I like about Knight, more than his fellow Medieval Murderers, is that his characters have such rich personal lives outside the mystery.  There are as many twists in the character development as there are in the murder, and I certainly didn't see the big twist in Chapter Sixteen coming.  It takes a confident author to pull a stroke like that, and yet I can't wait to see how it plays out in the next instalment.

If there is to be a next instalment, that is...  Knight normally knocks out a Crowner John on an annual basis but Plague of Heretics was published in 2010.  Since then he has been launching a new series, the Wye Valley series, which is only midly historical, being set in 1955.

Apparently, Knight is working on a Crowner John prequel.  Hm...

King's Gold - Michael Jecks

I have long been a fan of Michael Jecks' Knights Templar Mysteries, which now stretch to more than twenty titles.  I can't claim to have read all of them (yet) but Jecks and his fellow Medieval Murderer, Bernard Knight, are far and away my favourites in this burgeoning sub-genre.  Indeed, their heroes (Sir Baldwin and Crowner John) and West Country settings are broadly similar, albeit Knight's adventures take place 130-odd years earlier than Jecks's.  As a former Home Office pathologist, possibly the best-known since Spilsbury, you can trust Knight for his knowledge of crime and cadavers whereas I feel 100% confident of Jecks' historical research.

King's Gold is the latest Knights Templar in paperback.  Its historic setting, the short period between the deposition of Edward II and his notorious death, has long been of the utmost fascination to me.  As usual, the period detail is fascinating - the parallel murder mysteries are, in themselves, cunningly plotted - but the whole thing takes far too long to get going.  We are 67 pages in before our hero, Baldwin, appears at all, 230 before he joins the story proper.  Obviously this is far too long.  Baldwin is our hero, a key selling-point for the series, and we need him by chapter two at the latest.

That said, will I pick up the next instalment, City of Fiends, when I see it?  Like a shot.