Depending on the kindness of history by Steven Veerapen

Sometimes history can be kind to novelists. Occasionally, characters suggest themselves and, even more rarely, the historical record presents us with themes and ideas we’re already hoping to explore. History was very kind to me as I set about writing a Tudor-era murder mystery. Not only was Henry VIII’s suspicion-filled, blood-soaked royal court tailor made for intrigue, dark deeds and skulking figures, but the record of his reign threw up exactly the type of character who might work as a detective. 

In studying the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll, which captured in a series of images the celebratory jousts held to welcome Henry’s short-lived son, the “New Year’s Prince” into the world, I encountered a figure who has recently come under serious scholarly scrutiny. John Blanke - a tiny figure depicted twice, blowing his trumpet from the vellum margins of the narrative images - has the distinction of being one of the first (if not the first) black people in England whose name was recorded. Thus, he has recently sparked interest as scholars have scrambled to discover how he came to be depicted as a member (albeit a minor one) of Henry’s court, and how he came to be in England at all. The consensus is that he probably arrived with the retinue of Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon (who hailed from a united Spain which had conquered the “Moors” and begun transporting slaves from North Africa).

John’s story, however, wasn’t mine to tell. Again, though, history was kind; not only did John marry but he probably married an Englishwoman (we know, for example, that he was given gifts from the Tudors on the occasion of his wedding and that he had the clout to ask for higher wages - and there is no record of any black women in England during his time in service). As he disappears from the record in the late 1510s, I was left with - if you’ll excuse the pun - a blank.

I was also left with an idea. If John Blanke married an Englishwoman, it is possible - even likely - that the aim was to produce children (marriages in the period being generally more for the purposes of procreation than love or companionship). Any resulting child, born of two races, had a story I knew I could tell. Suddenly, given my own heritage (my mum being from Pollok and my dad from Mauritius!), I had a character I knew I could write - and one with ties, via his father, to the court of Henry VIII.

Devising and plotting any murder mystery relies on the construction of a detective figure, whether an amateur or a professional: we all know Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Lord Peter Wimsey. If writing a mystery set in the sixteenth century, one is virtually forced to go down the amateur route; there was no police force in Tudor England and there were no professional detectives.

What there was, however, was a great deal of law (even if it seems there was often very little justice). Henry VIII’s England, indeed, had officers at every level: urban aldermen; city watchmen (often respectable homeowners who farmed out the actual work to inferiors); local justices of the peace; constables; march wardens; churchwardens (who worked in and with ecclesiastical courts, whose jurisdiction covered spiritual crimes, such as adultery); and coroners (who were appointed rather than trained, and who held juried inquests into unexplained deaths). Yet the actual grind of investigative work was essentially up for grabs; a killer was, in all likelihood, going to get away with his or her crimes if those questioned at the inquest stage either fingered the wrong person or had no idea how a victim came to die. In order to be caught, a murderer very often had to be caught in the act or to have left a clear trail of evidence.

Into this confused world I launched Anthony Blanke, son of John, who follows in his father’s footsteps in working for the great (if not the good) in the 1520s – these the boon days of Henrician England, when Reformation was only distantly on the horizon. Once again, history – particularly that Westminster Tournament Roll – was good to me. On looking at it again, it struck me that a marginal figure (as Anthony Blanke would have to be, in various ways) was best placed to observe the comings and goings at his master, Cardinal Wolsey’s court. What better figure than a trumpeter, paid to be heard and not seen, and to lurk in alcoves and doorways, to spot shady dealings and piece together clues? I hope those who read “Of Blood Descended” find him and his world as much fun as I did.

 Of Judgment Fallen by Steven Veerapen (Birlinn General) Out Now

Spring, 1523. Henry VIII readies England for war with France. The King’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, prepares to open Parliament at Blackfriars. The eyes of the country turn towards London. But all is not well in Wolsey’s household. A visiting critic of the Cardinal is found brutally slain whilst awaiting an audience at Richmond Palace. He will not be the last to die. Anthony Blanke, trumpeter and groom, is once again called upon to unmask a murderer. Joining forces with Sir Thomas More, he is forced to confront the unpopularity of his master’s rule. As the bodies of the Cardinal’s enemies mount up around him, Anthony finds himself under suspicion. Journeying through the opulence of More’s home, the magnificence of Wolsey’s York Place, and the dank dungeons of London’s gaols, he must discover whether the murderer of the Cardinal’s critics is friend or foe. With time running out before Parliament sits, Anthony must clear his name and catch the killer before the King’s justice falls blindly upon him.

More information about Steven Veerapen and his books can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @stevenveerapen.

Some Books I am Looking Forward to in the first half of 2014

There are a vast number of books due out during the first six months of 2014 and there are quite a few that I am looking forward to reading.  So far between January 2014 and June 2014 I am looking forward to the following in no particular order!

The Ghost Runner is by Parker Bilal and is due to be published in February 2014.  It is 2002 and as tanks roll into the West Bank and the reverberations of 9/11 echo across the globe, tensions are running high on Cairo's streets.  Private Investigator Makana, in exile from his native Sudan and increasingly haunted by memories of the wife and daughter he lost, is shaken out of his grief when a routine surveillance job leads him to the horrific murder of a teenage girl.  In a country where honour killings are commonplace and the authorities seem all too eager to turn a blind eye, Makana determines to track down the perpetrator.  He finds unexpected assistance in the shape of Zahra, a woman who seems to share Makana's hunger for justice.  Seeking answers in the dead girl's past he travels to Siwa, an oasis town on the edge of the great Sahara desert, where the law seems disturbingly far away and old grievances simmer just below the surface.  As violence follows him through the twisting, sand-blown streets and an old enemy lurks in the shadows, Makana discovers that the truth can be as deadly and as changeable as the desert beneath his feet.

  

The Tournament is by Matthew Reilly and is due to be published in January 2014.  England, 1546: A young Princess Elizabeth is surrounded by uncertainty.  The Black Death stalks the land and with it deadly conspiracies against her.  She is not currently in line for the throne, but she remains a threat to her older sister and brother.  In the midst of this fevered atmosphere comes an unprecedented invitation from the Sultan in Constantinople.  He seeks to assemble the finest players of chess from the whole civilised world and pit them against each other.  The prize?  Fabulous wealth but also the honour of Christendom.  Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's teacher and mentor, is determined to keep her out of harm's way and continue her education in the art of power and politics.  Ascham resolves to take Elizabeth with him when he accompanies the English chess champion to the Ottoman capital.  But once there, the two find more danger than they left behind.  There's a grotesque killer on the loose and a Catholic cardinal has already been found mutilated in the grounds of the palace.  Ascham is asked by the Sultan to use his razor-sharp mind to investigate the crime.  But as he and Elizabeth delve deeper into the murky world of the court and the glittering chess tournament, they find dark secrets, horrible crimes, and unheard-of depravity.  Things that mark the young princess for life and define the queen that she will become...

The First Horseman is by D K Wilson and is due to be published in June 2014.  1536. In the corrupt heart of Tudor London a killer waits in the shadows...The Real Crime Before dawn on a misty November morning in 1536, prominent mercer Robert Packington was gunned down as he crossed Cheapside on his way to early morning mass.  It was the first assassination by handgun in the history of the capital and subsequently shook the city to its core.  The identity of his assassin has remained a mystery.  Our Story Thomas Treviot is a young London goldsmith and a close family friend of Robert Packington.  Through his own upstanding social connections - and some less upstanding acquaintances he has made along the way -, Thomas launches a dramatic investigation into Packington's death.  As Thomas searches for revenge, he must travel from the golden heart of merchant London, to the straw-covered backstreets of London's poorest districts before reaching the country's seat of power: the court of King Henry VIII.  Before long, he is drawn into a dark conspiracy beyond his wildest imaginings and claiming justice for his friend starts to look impossible.  Especially when Thomas realises that Robert wasn't the man he thought he knew...In the first of a new series investigating real unsolved Tudor crimes, D. K. Wilson brings the streets of Tudor London to spectacular life as Thomas Treviot faces a fight to bring the truth to light in the corrupt world of Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII.

The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana.  Twenty fighters.  One wire-fence ring.  Fight until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers - drunk and high on whatever's on offer - bet on the outcome.  Jarhead is a desperate man who'd do just about anything to feed his children.  He's also the toughest fighter in south eastern Kentucky, and he's convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it'll solve all his problems.  Meanwhile, there's Chainsaw Angus - an undefeated master fighter who isn't too keen on getting his face punched anymore, so he and his sister, Liz, have started cooking meth.  And they get in deep.  So deep that Liz wants it all for herself, and she might just be ready to kill her brother for it.  As we travel through the backwoods on the way to the Donnybrook, we meet a cast of nasty, ruined characters driven to all sorts of evil, all in the name of getting their fix - drugs, violence, sex, money, honour.  Donny-Brook is by Frank Bill and is due to be published in March 2014.

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew.  It doesn’t take her long to clear out the dead man’s remaining possessions, but one room remains stubbornly locked.  When Rea finally forces it open, she discovers inside a chair, a table – and a leather-bound book.  Inside its pages are locks of hair, fingernails: a catalogue of victims.  Horrified, Rea wants to go straight to the police but when her family intervene, Rea turns to the only person she can think of: DI Jack Lennon.  However, Lennon is facing his own problems, not least of all his suspension from the police force.  The Final Silence is by Stuart Neville and is due to be published in July 2014.

Judges is three crime stories by Italy’s most renowned crime writers Camilleri, best known for the Inspector Montalbano series, weaves a tale of a Turin judge who moves to a small Sicilian town, and tackles both entrenched mafia corruption and a string of culinary delicacies.  Lucarelli brings us a far darker tale.  “La Bambina” is a beautiful young judge, whose attempts to expose the complicity of the secret service in money laundering lead to multiple attempts on her life, and a desperate struggle for justice.  De Cataldo, a judge himself, tells a tale of an unending feud between a prosecutor and a mayor, set against the background of murder, sleaze, and impenetrable bureaucracy.  Judges is due to be published in May 2014.

The Wolf in Winter is by John Connolly and is due to be published in April 2014.  Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins . . . The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered.  Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children's future secure.  It shuns outsiders.  It guards its own.  And at the heart of the Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town . . . But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous.  Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance.  In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet.  Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive.

The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction is edited by Maxim Jakubowski and is due to be published in February 2014.  A truly mammoth collection of 7 decades of pure, unadulterated pulp fiction, jam-packed with tough guys and femme fatales.  Join shady operators, voluptuous molls, ruthless big shots and crooked – or just occasionally, honest – cops on a rollercoaster ride through the mean streets of popular literature in the company of outstanding writers of hardboiled crime such as Dashiell Hammett, Bill Pronzini and Micky Spillane, as well as some forgotten authors well worth rediscovering.

Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish.  Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde . . . It is the early 1950s. In Los Angeles, Private Detective Philip Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client arrives: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson.  Soon Marlowe will find himself not only under the spell of the Black-Eyed Blonde; but tangling with one of Bay City’s richest families – and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune . . . The Black-Eyed Blonde is by Benjamin Black and is due to be published in February 2014.  It sees a return of Raymond Chandler’s iconic private detective Philip Marlowe and the dark mesmerising world of The Long Goodbye.

Conn Iggulden talks War of the Roses and King Richard III

Today's guest blog is by Conn Iggulden a former English teacher. A historical fiction writer he has written books on Julius Caeser, Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.  Stormbird is the first book in the War of the Roses series which tells the story of the English Civil War.

Last month, the ‘Plantagenet Alliance’, which includes fifteen distant relatives of England’s King Richard III, were granted the right to a Judicial Review to decide the king’s final resting place.  Plans to reinter the skeleton of one of history’s most famous kings in Leicester have had to be halted until the issue is decided: Leicester or York.  The judge warned the parties not to begin a ‘legal War of the Roses 2’, but the gloves are already off.

The skeleton of King Richard III was discovered in Leicester last year.  DNA and carbon dating proved its authenticity, right down to the famous twisted spine.  The license to dig included permission for the king to be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.  Perhaps it is true that no one expected him to be found when that detail was decided, but the city of Leicester is taking it very seriously indeed.  A £1m tomb is already being built and there are plans for a £5m visitor centre.  

Over four years, one lady, Philippa Langley, tracked down the location of Greyfriars Friary.  When she needed £10,000 for the dig, money came in from America, Britain, Canada, even Holland and Austria – a demonstration of the enduring interest in this medieval monarch.  Could they find him?  Moreover, if they could, was Richard the malevolent hunchback of Shakespeare’s play?  Or a much-loved ruler, killed by a usurper at the age of just thirty-two?

     

The original Wars of the Roses lasted from 1455-1485, as the houses of York and Lancaster fought for the throne of England.  By the fourteen-eighties, the House of York had triumphed and thirty years of conflict had come to an end, with Richard’s older brother crowned as King Edward IV.  When he died of pneumonia, Richard made himself ‘Lord Protector’ while the country waited for Edward’s son to be crowned.  The heir was on his way to his coronation, when he was intercepted by his uncle Richard and put in the Tower of London, ostensibly for his own protection.  The mother of the boys trusted Richard enough to send him the other son as well.  After all, the Tower was then a royal residence as well as a prison, a zoo and the royal mint. 

 It is true that Richard then declared his brother’s marriage invalid, rendering those children illegitimate and unable to become king.  He had himself crowned King Richard III in 1483 and – however it happened – the two Princes in the Tower were never seen again.

There was one Lancastrian lord left who might challenge the house of York, in Wales.  Yet Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was weak and his only choice was to take it with victory on the battlefield.  He raised an army of French and Welsh and the forces met in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth.  King Richard had no heir when that battle began.  He would have known that if he fell, the fate of his line and his house all ended with him. 

From the wounds to his skeleton, we know King Richard took three strikes to his head: a skimming cut from an axe, a dagger thrust that chipped bone and a final fatal blow to the back of his skull.  From historical accounts, we know his body was stripped and tied facedown to a horse to be paraded around Leicester.  A sword or dagger impaled him from behind, a deliberate, brutal humiliation.  All of that is shown in the cuts and breaks of his bones – just as his hunchback was revealed in the great serpentine twist of his spine.

That crooked spine could well have been the seed of all that came later.  In medieval times, it was considered bad luck to even touch a hunchback.  Deformities of any kind were seen as evidence of evil or God’s punishment for misdeeds.  Yet despite constant pain, Richard III was a warrior-king.  Contemporary sources show he was well regarded, even loved by his subjects.  His tainted legend seems to have grown from the House of Tudor’s desperate need for legitimacy.  After all, the worse Richard could be made to seem, the more noble the Tudors became by removing him.

Whatever the truth of the Princes in the Tower, Richard III was made into a monster by historians and playwrights hoping to win Tudor favour.  He was held responsible for the murders of everyone from kings and princes, to his own wife and two of his brothers.

Thanks to Philippa Langley, that shadowy figure has been revealed as a man once more: flawed, without doubt; twisted in body, but no more a monster than any other king of the age.  He lay for five centuries in Leicester, close to where he was killed.  I would have thought it was about time to send him home – to York.

The video for Stormbird can be seen below.

More information about Conn Iggulden can be found on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter at @Conn_Iggulden.     

 Wars of the Roses: Stormbird, (£18.99, HB, Michael Joseph, 10^th October)