Catching up with Joliffe

I'd been vaguely aware that Margaret Frazer had started a second series of books focusing on one of the recurring characters from her 15th-century mystery novels featuring the nun Frevisse.  This time last year, I was burning through Frevisse novels out of stress.  So this year, also feeling stressed, I decided to pick up the four novels centering on the traveling player (actor) Joliffe and see how well they worked.

I was a little hesitant about the series, since Frazer was going back into her own well-developed chronology and fitting new stories into the spaces between the old ones.  She doesn't have a whole lot of wiggle room: as told in the Frevisse stories, in 1434, Joliffe was traveling with four other players, but by 1439 the other players had retired and he was wandering alone as a minstrel and freelance spy.  In 1447 he was a rather higher-class spy, and in 1450 he rides off into the sunset to a home and a wife.

The four Joliffe books published so far (another is in the works) take place in 1434 and 1435, during the period in which he was traveling with the other players.  That was a plus for me, since I'm a theater nut; books about traveling actors are instantly appealing.  And all four books deliver on both the theatrical and mystery fronts.

Frazer has done a bit of mild retconning; in Joliffe's first appearance in the second Frevisse mystery, The Servant's Tale, his companions are the players Ellis and Basset and the woman Rose with her son Piers, who is described as being the son of one of the three players, though they're not sure which.  For the Joliffe series, she has made a few tweaks which I noticed but decided I could live with.  Rose is now Basset's daughter.  Her son is by a long-vanished husband, while Ellis is her would-be lover.  Joliffe remains the youngest of the adult actors and the one who usually plays the womens' roles as well as being their playwright, charged with both writing new plays and altering old ones to suit the small size of their troupe.  The plays themselves are a mix of slapstick comedy and primitive Biblical dramas, much like the Passion plays that Sarah Ruehl played around with in her Passion Play triptych, but I still love reading about the tricks of performing them.

A Play of Isaac (2004) has the troupe in Oxford for the Corpus Christi festival in the spring of 1434, staying at the home of a wealthy merchant whose family includes a wife, son, and daughter along with two male wards, one clearly suffering from Down Syndrome (though it's not named as such).  A simple plan to perform both for the family and in the town for the festival is complicated when a man is murdered and his body left outside the actors' lodgings.  Complications ranging from heresy to an unwanted betrothal to the mysterious connection between Basset and their host provide a steady stream of diversions until Frazer -- and Joliffe -- pull them all neatly together at the end.

A Play of Dux Moraud (2005) follows a few months later, chronologically, and takes the troupe to a manor house where a wedding is being planned.  The troupe is now officially under the protection of the wealthy Lord Lovell, who has asked Joliffe to quietly investigate the household and see if there is anything to be wary of after the girl's previous betrothal ended with her intended's death.  An unpleasant family and a series of potentially fatal accidents suffered by their young heir provide complications, and Frazier keeps things deliciously confusing all the way until the final cascade of reveals.

Moving into the spring of 1435, in A Play of Knaves (2006), the troupe is once again sent by Lord Lovell to perform in a village with Joliffe ordered to find out what sort of angry cross-currents are going on among three of its most prominent families.  Said cross-currents rapidly escalate to murder, with the actors the prime suspects.  A brief hint of Joliffe's mysterious past also comes to light in the person of a woman he once spent an evening with.

Finally, in A Play of Lords (2007), set later in 1435, Frazer takes her troupe almost as high as it can go: performing in London for both Lord Lovell and the ambitious Bishop Beaufort, who takes an active part in the intrigues around the young Henry VI and the political trouble surrounding the defection of the Duke of Burgundy from his former alliance with England.  Beaufort's desire to use the troupe as a political tool via anti-Burgundy plays and Joliffe as a spy among both the nobility and the townsmen create a whole new set of problems; this is more a political mystery than a murder mystery, though murder victims do turn up to complicate matters.  The rivalries and alliances among the different performers and acting troupes working in the different noble households add fun theatrical color.

Overall, all four books are well worth the read: very competent mysteries in well-researched historical settings which held me to the very end of each, with plenty of theatrical color and good characterization both in the continuing characters and the ones unique to each book.  I'm getting to like Frazer's work every bit as much as Ellis Peters' Cadfael books.  The constant shift in setting (town to manor to village to London) keeps them from getting stale; a traveling troupe of actors is much easier to manage in that regard than Frevisse, for whom Frazer must come up with an ongoing series of excuses to get her out of her nunnery.  With the first two books, I wondered whether the titles were commentary on the plot as well as being the names of plays performed within, but if that had been Frazer's intention, she seems to have let it go with the third and fourth books.

I do foresee a problem with the speed at which she has moved her players up the social strata, however.  After performing for nobility and even royalty, it's going to be harder to turn them back into starving players barely surviving from village to village.  It's good that the settings stay fresh, but I don't know where else she goes from here and how she eventually takes Joliffe back to a poor wandering minstrel.  Since the books are coming out at a fair clip, with four books in five years and another due later this year, presumably I'll be finding out fairly soon.

I recommend all four books as well as the original Frevisse series, though you need not have read the latter to enjoy the former.  Here are links for the four Joliffe books: