Howard of Warwick's THE GARDROBE OF DEATH

One extremely common, perhaps even required, element of the historical mystery genre, at least since Caleb Carr took it on, is that of a particular kind of skepticism about the detective/hero's newfangled ways. Usually it's a matter of whatever science is cutting edge at the time, as Carr's hero is an early adopter of things like fingerprinting, at which the establishment still scoffs. Sometimes this is played for laughs, sometimes it is not.

In Howard of Warwick's Brother Hermitage series, it's played for laughs. Big, loud belly laughs that shake chairs and startle dogs. Because the newfangled science employed by Mr. Of Warwick's hero is reason itself, and the simple peasants, soldiers, servants and nobles of early Norman England* are such complete strangers to it that, well, let's just say if a woman weighed the same as a duck they'd try to build a bridge our of her.

The Gardrobe of Death , the second novel in Mr. Of Warwick's series, is thus already guaranteed to be pretty damned funny, just like its predecessor, because, in my book, horrible reasoning never stops being funny, but then there's the book's premise: in England's crappiest castle, surrounded by the least competent band of "guerrillas" the Saxons have to offer and ruled by the Normans' very worst specimen, a murder takes place in the crappy castle's crappiest place: its crapper. Or in the parlance of the day, its "gardrobe", a room that usually juts out from a high tower over a pretty good slope, to let the crap that emerges from its holey seats roll downhill.

Only this crapcastle's builders didn't understand that, so just put some seats with holes in them above the holes in the floor, so all that is produced there just plops down into the room below. Where the castle's priest lives. Or lived until said priest realized what had happened.

The priest hasn't lived in that room, and it hasn't been cleaned out or even opened, for years, by the way. Yeah.

And in said masterpiece of sanitation, late one night, a visiting Norman V.I.P. is murdered. By taking an arrow right up his poop chute. Insert Tywin Lannister joke here, I suppose, but I reckon this murder is way worse in every way. 

And funnier.

So yeah, in addition to the relatively highbrow yuks of reading the dialogue of characters with absolutely no grasp of abstract thought or language (or are just really stupid as when, for example, the Lord of the Manor first sees the victim and says "My god, no wonder he's dead. How on earth did he eat a whole arrow?" and then is flabbergasted when someone suggests that the arrow is on the way in, not out), we also have literal yucks. Lots of them.

This is not a book for people who get easily grossed out, is what I'm saying.

But if you can handle all the poop humor, this is another delightfully silly read, as well as being the ultimate Locked Room mystery. Think about it: with the room situated as I've described, how did someone shoot an arrow right up the bunghole of someone hunkered down on the seat of ease? Who could possibly solve such a disgusting mystery?

Only Brother Hermitage, the lowly monk with an eye for detail and next to no clue about social interaction, and his sidekick Wat, who as a dealer in pornographic tapestries is maybe the only person in Norman England with any social mobility at all.

It's tightly plotted, it's gross, it's shameless, it's ridiculous, and you'll absolutely love it. If you can handle the nasty, smelly truth of it. And if you can't, what are you reading historical mystery farce for?

*We're taking very early, like right after William the Bastard hopped the English Channel and changed his name to the Conqueror.

Howard of Warwick's THE HERETICS OF DE'ATH

You may recall last fall when my book-crazy mother, fan of all things with even a hint of medieval mystery fiction, turned me on to Howard of Warwick and his truly side-splitting historical farce, The Domesday Book, No Not That One. I was doubled over, I was in tears, I was gasping for air. I took many months to recover from teh funneh.

Then I finally attempted another of Mr. Of Warwick's books, and while I did not have quite the same life-threatening experiences, I did have a pretty good time getting to know one Brother Hermitage, who made a cameo appearance in Domesday but whose true character awaited discovery.

His true character being sort of an idiot savant Brother William of Baskerville, or a very sheltered Sherlock Holmes. And yes, he has an Adso/Watson of sorts in the redoubtable person of one Wat the Weaver, purveyor of pornographic tapestries, in other words, a perfect wordly foil to the decidedly unworldly Hermitage.*

In this first novel of his chronicles, Hermitage finds himself in a situation somewhat similar to that which made Brother William famous**, namely, a murder in a monastery.***Or at least a death, one which seems perfectly natural at first, but the innocent-seeming narrative of which is quickly seized on by powers greater than Hermitage as a way to further decidedly un-innocent ends.

How great those powers are, what is their scheme, and how it all relates to an exceedingly obscure and farcically pointless theological argument (did Jesus get sand in his shoes while enduring his 40 days in the wilderness?) (No, really, that's the point of contention) is kept secret until the denouement, when an entire novel's worth of bizarre and maddening tension is released as rapidly -- and perhaps with much the same sound -- as a balloon that has been inflated, but not tied off, flies around a room.

Or, in other words, this time around, the belly laughs are saved up for a big gasping mess at the end, like, say, verbs in a German sentence. As described by my mom, anyway.****

Speaking of the ending, it also sets up the most ridiculous conspiracy theory, maybe ever, concerning a certain very famous event in English history.

Now, if I can just figure out what a Dingle is. It can't be what my inner twelve-year-old thinks it is.

Great stuff. My compliments to the scribe.

*Whose name, we learn, was bestowed on him early in his monastic career, when his fellow monks realized his nature as a big ol' dork even by monk standards, and suggested strongly the he consider a life of contemplative solitude. And silence.

**I'm talking about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which every reasonably civilized person should at least watch in cinema form if they're not up to reading its very dense and allusive and erudite pages. But you'd be cheating yourself, however wonderful the film is (which is very).

***An edifice which rejoices in the name of De'Ath's Dingle. Um.

****I don't know much German.

Howard of Warwick's THE DOMESDAY BOOK (NO, NOT THAT ONE)

If your favorite bit of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was phrases like "the ships hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't", have I got a book for you.

If you love the Blackadder series but don't think it was quite farcical enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love the History Channel's drama Vikings but think the characters depicted aren't stupid or violent enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love The Hallelujah Trail but wish it could have been set in the days of the Norman Conquest of England, have I got a book for you.

Howard of Warwick, famed for the Brother Hermitage books, a series of comic medieval mystery novels I'm definitely going to have to have a look at sometime, is your man, and The Domesday Book (No, Not That One) is your book. Set in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and featuring a ridiculous cast of historical and made-up figures, it's a deeply silly read that can easily be described in one choice excerpt:

From the north of Wisbech a cart load of Vikings. From the south a cartload of Normans. In the middle a band of wounded Saxons riding hell-for-leather. Well, riding as fast as most of their injuries would allow, which was actually pretty slow.

The Vikings have been dispatched on, of all things, a rescue mission; the Normans on one of capture; the Saxons, including a man of high repute wounded in the eye-or-thigh, are the targets of both. Because, you see, the knight who triumphantly brought King Harold's body to William the Conqueror's tent after the Battle of Hastings brought the wrong body, but this was not noticed until a lot of crowing and woofing had been done, and now the demented and homicidal William is demanding the real thing, loudly and violently... but in complete secrecy. Of course.

The story is mostly told from the points of view of two Saxons, Mabbut, drafted to act as a local guide for the Normans even though he's not really ever been to England, having grown up in France in the mistaken belief that his family are hostages (actually, his parents just like France better); and Siward, a village idiot and "filth man" kidnapped by the Vikings for the same purpose, even though he's never been a mile or two from home. Hilarity, mostly in the form of death threats and impatience with ignorant rustics, ensues in both storylines.

It's all deeply silly, though not quite in that Monty Python way you're probably hoping for. There's fun to be had here, but the fun is mostly for history nerds, I suspect.

I am one of those, so I laughed, often.

Amor Towles' THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

Toward the ending of Amor Towles' latest, The Lincoln Highway a character pauses to look at a wall full of photographs, an elegaic moment he commemorates with these thoughts:

...the funny thing about a picuture is that while it knows everything that's happened up until the moment it's been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And irreversible.

Reading historical fiction, of which The Lincoln Highway is almost a platonic ur-example, is a lot like that. The characters and their world are perfectly established within the text and the reader comes to know everything that's happened within it, but after the last page is read, one can't but wonder what happened to them all next. Knowing, as the characters didn't, what history had in store for their world, right up to the present day.

As I started on my way through The Lincoln Highway, I kind of found myself wanting to hate it, but not quite being able to. A weird reading experience, to say the last, but of course it wasn't really the story or the characters I was wanting to hate (with a few unambiguous exceptions), but how history unfolded afterwards, for the better and for the worse -- and how rather more people than I would have originally thought are so upset that the worse happened (even if they themselves came through it just fine) that they'd rather the better hadn't happened either (even if they, too, have benefitted from it).

People read historical fiction for a couple of different reasons. A lot are for a kind of romance; the past becomes an impossible-to-reach kind of place where people dress and talk and eat and act differently and we're delighted to be tourists in that so-different world for a while. We might be encountering historical figures we've come to idolize and get directly to watch them doing the deeds that made them famous. Or we might see them through the eyes of an imaginary ordinary schmoe whose less famous deeds affect or are affected by those of the Great. Or we might enjoy the kind of plots we enjoy from other genres stitched onto historical events, witness the great popularity of things like murder mysteries set in Norman England (see especially Howard of Warwick, who does exactly this and makes them funny to boot), or high fantasy set in sort of France or Byzantium (hello, Guy Gavriel Kay), or that whole wild genre we call Weird Westerns. Or...

Or we might wish to visit the scenes of our own actual sort-of-remembered youths, in which romance threatens to yield to nostalgia. 

We're living through another period in which nostalgia has been weaponized to turn people against one another in the name of making things like they were in the good old days, which only about half of us seem willing to remember that the good old days (in this case, the early 1950s in the United States of America) were only really good for the people on the top of the socio-political heap. Not so great if you were poor, a person of color, disabled, LGBTQ+, neuro-divergent, etc. But look, I get it -- for the people who had it good in the 1950s, there were probably more people who had it better than any other humans in history before or since. There were good union jobs that let a person support a family on just one income. Public education had higher standards and everybody pulled together to see that they at least came close to meeting them. Ladies still wore pretty dresses and men wore suits and stylish hats and cars were big and luxurious and made out of real steel and real leather and stuff was built to last. Yada yada. 

But still, only some people got to enjoy that, and when everybody else started acting like they'd actually bought into that old American chestnut that anybody could have it if they only worked hard and behaved, well, the people on top, instead of trying to find a way to extend that good life to more people, they started squandering the resources that would have been required to achieve that on keeping everybody else down and out by whatever means necessary. And when everybody else wouldn't just meekly say, okay sir, sorry, I'll go back to my hovel and starve now -- things got nasty, and have been getting nastier ever since.

Point being, nostalgia for the 1950s is pretty toxic in this endless plague year of 2020 And Some Months, and if you don't think so, you're probably part of the problem, and I really wish you'd go get vaccinated before you catch this stupid virus and die or give it to someone else and they die. And maybe consider that if you just realize that "Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean that other lives don't, but that people want you to realize that black lives matter, too. In adition to, rather than instead of, as it were.

But I digress.

But so, then, why did I even pick up a historical novel set in the very time and place that all of this weaponized nostalgia points to as those good old days, then? Well, two things: the author and the title.

I really liked Towles' earlier work, A Gentleman in Moscow, I've many friends who've told me that Rules of Civility is every bit as good... and I hear Amor Towles' name mentioned in the same breath as my beloved E.L. Doctorow more and more, it seems. So I'm inclined to have a look at anything else with his name on it that crosses my path. Meanwhile, this new book of his is named for the Lincoln Highway, aka US Highway 30, which passes a mere 20 miles north of the town where I grew up and whose length (disguised most of the way as Interstate 80*) I have traveled from sea to shining sea my own self. Plus, if you're a fan of that great but incomplete old HBO drama, Carnivale, you've spent some time on that good old Lincoln Highway in your imagination already. Not as sexy as Route 66, but a lot more important in that boring, utilitarian, sound and unflashy way -- kind of like the president it was named for.

Plus, as the early course of the plot sets us up to believe, this road trip novel suggests it's going to take us west, right through all of the Wyoming towns in which I've spent most of my life in one way or another -- the trail of postcards left by the first abandoning character (lots of abandoning happens in this book), for instance, includes stops in Cheyenne, Rawlins and Rock Springs on the way to sunny California. So, I mean, of course I was going to read this.

But I had my suspicions. And for a long time, it felt like my suspicions were right. Because even though the young heroes of The Lincoln Highway are down and out at story's beginning -- Emmet Watson was just granted compassionate early release from a reform school after his dad died, leaving no one else to care for Emmet's eight-year-old brother, Billy, and the two young rogues who stowed away on Emmet's ride back to his family's failed Nebraska farm, Duchess and Wooly -- are all able bodied, good-looking, intelligent young white men (and boy) of the type that had to make pretty much a deliberate effort to fail in the USA of the 1950s, even if two of them are semi-orphaned and one is slightly neuro-divergent.

But, thank goodness, as the journey proceeds, we meet some characters with some melanin, but even there it's a tiny bit problematic in that they are Paragons of Respectability By White Standards**. Chief among these is Ulysses, a big burly black man who saves little Billy from an attack, who is not only a war veteran but a man who was happily married with a child on the way until he joined the army to go fight in World War II -- against his wife's wishes. She didn't understand, or didn't care, about the social pressures that came to bear on able-bodied men (even ones with deferred jobs like he had) to not just serve but Serve. When he came home, having survived the war, his family was gone, and he's been searching for them ever since. There is a very touching moment as Billy, during their ripening acquaintance, insists to Ulysses that he must have been named for the Greek hero and not the Civil War general/U.S. President, and that Billy thinks maybe Ulysses is Great Ulysses reborn and is thus destined to regain his family after ten years of wandering (of course this Ulysses has been wandering for just over nine years when we meet him). Ulysses cries and lets himself begin to hope again after Billy tells him the very abridged version of the Odyssey that is in his prized possession, a compendium of heroes real and imaginary, from Achilles to Zorro, with -- and while this book already seems like the most 1950s object ever, it proves to be even more so when the charming detail is shared that there is no entry for the letter Y apart from "You", with blank space for a boy*** to write down his own adventures when he has them someday.

But so, see, this just reeks of little white savior crap, right? And this is never really addressed or redeemed except that it kind of is just by the sheer quality of this goddamned book. The Lincoln Highway is a beautiful read, with wonderful scenes both funny and tragic and poignant and, it's got one more quality that I found way more refreshing than I should have (an indictment more of my general choices as far as what I read than of anything else, I reckon): its primary hero, Emmet, is actually heroic. Not in the sense of saving damsels in distress or foiling deadly plots or capturing bad guys, but in the sense of having a strong moral compass that he actually obeys throughout, a strict code that he actually adheres to, but without a trace of toxic masculinity. He has high standards for himself and his behavior and subjects his decision making to rigorous scrutiny, having learned well by observing the failings of his parents from an early age even before he made the mistake that sent him to reform school far away and then received an even more thorough-going moral instruction that he took to heart BUT GET THIS, he doesn't get judgmental of others who don't live up to his standards. Nor does he lose his temper unless truly extremely and very deliberately provoked. At times he has the impulse to yield to fury for less -- many times, frankly, because while Billy is just precocious and trusting and thus a handful, Duchess and Wooly are, in their different ways, still rogues(though as the story proceeds we kind of see that maybe Emmet has rubbed off on them a little bit), rogues whose very existence throws monkey wrenches into Emmet's and Billy's plans almost before they're laid and whose quirks and caprices keep on creating obstacles to the Watson brothers' progress through the story -- but he checks himself, explains his reasoning, and moves on to solving a problem rather than spending time casting blame or seeking to punish anyone.

I think the last hero like Emmet that I've encountered was maybe Captain John Carter of Mars (and yes, I know, he was a Confederate captain, but that's before he became John Carter of Mars). Kind of refreshing, is what I'm saying.

But see where this is still dangerous? I'm afraid that The Lincoln Highway could be a very dangerous book, with all the charm and musicality of prose of, say, Doctorow's Ragtime but without its notes of social criticism. It's a deeply pleasurable read if you can shut off that little nag of social conscience that I hope most of *my* readers have at any rate.

But maybe I'm the asshole for assuming that it's going to be weaponized? Are the alt-right types even reading contemporary U.S. fiction that isn't being flogged to them on extremist podcasts and OAN? All the places I see reviewing this book so far are outlets that are not beloved of that crowd -- NPR, the New York Times, etc. So maybe I'm worrying about nothing and should just shut up and enjoy the book and let other people enjoy it. BUT, I am extremely online, so I see stuff exactly like this getting corrupted all the time, so yeah, I guess what I've got to do is hope they don't find this. And that Amor Towles isn't one of those guys? Which... he kind of could be? Because I have a feeling all of his fiction is like this, maybe?

Maybe I should just delete this blog post, which got way more political than mine usually do. I guess you should all be glad I don't read a lot of historical fiction set in 20th century America.

Don't worry. I'll be bombarding you with Roberto Bolaño soon.

*Though hey, in Wyoming there are stretches where the Interstate diverges from the old highway because a bunch of landowners strong-armed the government into re-routing it so they, instead of other people, could collect the compensation even though the route they forced the interstate to take was already known to be much less safe, more prone to closures in bad weather, all around just worse, and that stretch of the Interstate is one of the deadliest in the country and I really wonder how many of their fellow human beings' blood is on that compensation money those landowners got... just a few years after the events in this novel, actually...

***And, even more cringe, the closest thing we get to a villain of color is a side character who has light skin and freckles (and this is mentioned more than once to make sure we notice) and can thus be understood as of mixed race and I'm still cringing a little bit at that choice.

***Think many girls were given a book like this back then? My knee-jerk thought is of course not, but come on, the 1950s were no more definable only by the stereotypes about them than our times should be to people in the future, if there are any! Ha ha!

Jodi Taylor's JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER

So for those of you who have been dying to know what would happen if Thursday Next and Doctor Who had a baby (perhaps, just for fun, midwived by the Librarians and maybe Connie "Oxford Time Travel" Willis), your wait is over! And your reward cup runneth over, cuz this is a series that is growing, Dark Tower/Expanse style, in all directions. As in later books/stories/novellas get decimal points and wedged in between existing books in series order and stuff.

But...

I'm not 100% sure that I'm along for that whole ride, because cool as the premise of this series "The Chronicles of St. Mary's" is, there are a lot of problems in its execution that make me hesitate. But I'll get to those. What's up with THIS book, right?

Just One Damned Thing After Another*, the first book in the series, starts off with our heroine fresh out of graduate school and still scarred from a very bad childhood that she's managed to overcome mostly, it seems, by ignoring it except when it's convenient to use as an emotional shield to Keep People At A Distance. She is a historian, and soon to be a Historian; she is recruited by what seems to be just another adorably ramshackle and barely-organized English think tank but is actually the most amazing historical research institution in the world because they have time machines! And they want our girl, Dr. Miss Lucy Maxwell (since everyone there has at least one PhD she soon drops the "Dr.") to do research for them! By which they totally mean travel through time and watch stuff happen and clear up nagging questions about fact versus fancy! Who wouldn't want to do that?

But so soon complications emerge. St. Mary's is a perfectly straightforward and innocent outfit, but it turns out there are other parties with time travel capability who are not, and they're amuck in History performing various nefarious deeds that usually tend to involve active threats to the lives and limbs of members of Team St. Mary's. Hmmm! And some of the people in the (staggeringly long and detailed) dramatis personae (except the author calls it Dramatis Thingummy because she's trying to be arch and  cute and funny and Douglas Adams-ish**) are Not Who They Seem.

And of course, our Miss Maxwell is way more important than we at first thought.

All of this should be, and sometimes is, awesome. Lucy's first real assignment, for instance, is genuinely exciting and interesting and moving. She and some teammates are trained up to impersonate nurses and orderlies at a French chateau/hospital in France circa WWI's action in the Somme, there to clear up once and for all exactly whose fault it is that the complex was destroyed with great loss of life and morale and property. This is good stuff, written, paced and felt extremely well, even as it introduces several elements of the larger plot quite elegantly. It's only the hope of more stuff like this that I consider continuing with this series at all.

But then there's the other stuff. The soap opera/softcore porn stuff. And the fact that most of the male characters are pretty sloppily developed and often exhibit behavior wildly at odds with their established personalities. We're to believe, I gather, that this is because of stress, but I dunno. And just to spell it out and maybe also issue a Trigger Warning, there's a surprising amount of attempted/implied sexual assault in a book that otherwise comes off as a light-hearted romp. And no, it's not historically rapey types being historical and rapey.

And these unpleasant scenes jangle unpleasantly against the fair amount of eye-rolling romance novel dialogue ("I just want you to say you love me sometimes" "I can't do that because I love you all the time" HURL) that is shoved into this novel in places.

But as I said, that crap is very nearly redeemed.by the excellent mission material. This is time travel the way you and I would do it. Not let's kill Hitler, but let's save knowledge! And find out for certain whether dinosaurs had feathers! 

So, in short, this book is a bit of a hot mess, with as much to hate as to love about it. I'm probably going to have a look at the second volume sometime, just in the hopes that ultimately this settles down and becomes the awesome time traveling white hats vs black hats silliness that it really wants to be, instead of a coverall-ripper. But since this first book was pretty much half-and-half, with a pretty generous helping of Mary Sue*** in our main character, I'm not going to rush right into Book Two.

*The title is taken from an Arnold Toynbee quote, in which he describes history as "just one damned thing after another."

**And to be fair, sometimes she succeeds at this. Sometimes. But she's no, say, Howard of Warwick.

***I dislike this gender-specific, often misapplied and definitely overused term, but it kind of applies here, I'm afraid. She's adorable! She's important! Everybody wants to "get in her knickers"! She totally saves the day a lot! She finds the organization's True Purpose! And the guy in charge (well, I guess he's the second in command, because there's one guy they call "Chief" and another they call "Boss" and he's the Chief) is her One True Love! So yeah, a bit Mary Sue. A lot more so than, say, Rey Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi/Whatever is, anyway.