Historical Detective Novels

Since John Dickson Carr set the example (although he was not the first; there was Christie's Egyptian mystery Death Comes As the End or Tey's Richard III Revised The Daughter of Time, for example), there has been a recent proliferation of this sub-genre, which I happen to like. Earlier practitioners were Robert Van Gulik and Lillian de la Torre. Now there's a whole slew of them. The ones mentioned here are series authors. See also the special web page on this site. [* indicates especially good]

• England
  • Ellis Peters (Medieval) -- Brother Cadfael: nicely realized series with good recurring characters, but awfully romanticized plot lines (usually young lovers being thwarted). She (the late Edith Pargeter) started as a mediocre detective novelist, but captured this new market and raised up this new sub-genre almost from scratch. There are now a bunch of series about medieval nuns, priests, whatever as detectives. Cadfael is now a major industry in this appalling redneck town (Shrewsbury).
  • P.C. Doherty (Medieval) -- Hugh Corbete, secret agent for Edward I; conspiracies and witch cults
  • *Edward Marston (Elizabethan) -- detective Nicholas Bracewell of Lord Westfield's Men acting troupe; good political skulduggery, nice cast of characters and great theatre stuff
  • Leonard Tourney (Elizabethan) -- County Constable Matthew Stock; pleasant series, with political intrigue (Walsingham, the 1st great spy-master; of course, it goes with the times)
  • *John Dickson Carr (1660s to 1920s) -- consult the Web Page
  • Lillian de la Torre (18th C) -- Dr. Sam: Johnson Detector series of short stories; the incomparable Dictionary personage as a detective, as narrated by Boswell
  • Bruce Alexander (18th century) -- Sir John Fielding. Good thrillers (not really mysteries, although there is always a 'surprise' villain). Justice Fielding, the 'Blind Beak' was a real person, who along with his brother Henry, the novelist, did much to establish the modern police department. (I wrote my master's thesis about Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones, while not a mystery novel, is probably the most well-plotted book of its time; the clockwork structure is fantastic -- he set the book in the historical past by a few years, into the Jacobite rebellion, but actually consulted almanacs to make sure that there was a full moon on that particular night, etc. -- 200 years later Henry Fielding could have written classic detective stories.)
  • Charles Sheffield (18th C) -- Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather); an oddball small collection of short stories in the Jules de Grandin (Seabury Quinn) mode
  • J.G. Jeffreys (Regency) -- Bow Street Runner Jeremy Sturrock; I couldn't really get into these [will try again some day, there are a lot of them]
  • Francis Selwyn (Victorian) -- Sergeant Verity of the Yard; kind of fun (Swell Mobs, Indian Mutineers, etc.)
  • *Peter Lovesey (Victorian) -- Sergeant Cribb, The Prince of Wales ('Bertie'), among others; great period pieces with unusual settings (on purpose, of course)
  • Ray Harrison (Edwardian) -- D.S. Bragg and Constable Morton, an interesting pair of police detectives (higher-ranking one is a Cockney and the other is a Toff)
  • *Peter Dickinson, Robert Barnard, Julian Symons, and others -- Contemporary detective story writers of high repute who have set some novels back in the time of the 'Golden Age of Detection'; I guess that makes them historical novels, but since I teethed on the genre, I'm not sure I regard them as such, more like respectful tributes to a bygone age

• Old New York (well, and maybe the rest of the USA)
  • S.S. Rafferty (Revolutionary War US) -- Captain Jeremy Cork; good short stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
  • Raymond Paul -- Lawyer Lou Quinncannon (brothels and barrooms, newsrooms and courthouses -- good stuff)
  • Michael McDowell -- A couple of gruesome period pieces by the master of grue (Gilded Needles and Katie)
  • William Marshall -- The New York Detective; bizarre police 'procedurals' set at the turn of the century [have you ever read his weird Yellowthread Street Precinct books set in modern Hong Kong?]
  • *Edward D. Hoch (1920s New England) -- Dr. Sam Hawthorne; anecdotes of an old man who solved more 'impossible crimes' than Dr. Gideon Fell [this gets us into Uncle Abner territory, but those are NOT Historical Mysteries because the period was not historical then -- am I quibbling over a technicality?]

• MISCELLANEOUS
  • Ancient Rome
    • Lindsay Davis -- Edile Marcus Didius Falco in the court of Vespasian; Rome's answer to Archie Goodwin; good dirty fun
    • *Steven Saylor -- Gordianus the Finder in the days of Cicero; politics, corruption and debauchery -- great stuff (much nastier than Davis's). The portrayal of the Dictator Sulla is excellent. But nothing has yet matched Graves's I, Claudius (the difference being that the Saylor books, starting with Roman Blood, are novels by a 20th-C author, no matter how well-researched and well-written, but Graves was a mad poet and really believed he was writing the autobiography of Claudius -- and that comes across in every pore, if that's not an inappropriate metaphor). Regardless, these Gordianus novels are highly recommended.
  • Ancient China
    • Robert van Gulik -- Judge Dee; fascinating (though the formula wears out after a while), exotic setting, to us, strange customs, ritualized structure based on traditional Chinese crime story formats; however, RvG was a Dutchman, so his style does not scintillate (maybe that's impolitic of me to say). Check this web site (while you can -- it is a news service of Radio Netherlands, and they may not keep it up forever) -- interesting person, played both lute and lady equally well.
  • Ancient Egypt
    • Agatha Christie -- Death Comes As the End; an experiment in historical detection for which you have to give her credit, but not altogether successful
    • Lynda S. Robinson -- Lord Meren ('Eyes and Ears of the Pharoah') in the court of Tutankhamun; start of a very nice series; well researched, even if the characters seem anachronistic in that they behave like Washington politicians at their worst, and there is a touch of Regency Romance in the style (actually, those nuances are what make these books fun)