A Play of Treachery

I'd been keeping an eye out for Margaret Frazer's latest Joliffe mystery since I read the first four of them back in the summer.  Taking up shortly after 2007's A Play of Lords in the autumn of 1435, A Play of Treachery (Berkeley Prime Crime Historical Mystery, 2009) takes Joliffe away from his company of players and off to France to serve as a spy in the household of the widowed young Duchess of Bedford.  That answers my immediate question after reading the first four books, which was where Frazer could take her character after having his formerly poverty-stricken acting troupe perform for the highest nobility in London.  The answer, apparently, is away from his troupe entirely.  I have mixed feelings about this, since for me part of the attraction of this particular series is the chance to read about 15th-century players and early English drama.  Taking the theater out of it lessens my interest, and I'm sorry to lose track of the other players.  On the other hand, the character of Joliffe himself, with his mysterious background and multiple unexplained aliases, is still compelling, and I haven't lost hope that he will eventually go back to being a player along with a spy.

In the meantime, he's off to France.  This once again provides a fresh setting, but at the price of a horrendous amount of setup before getting around to the actual mystery part: nearly two thirds of the book goes by before we get to the murder and Joliffe's opportunity to play sleuth.  While the political intrigue and historical background material is genuinely interesting to me, that's still a lot of book to plow through before settling into the mystery.  It's a good payoff, however: the mystery is cleverly done.  And as a spy, Joliffe is in fact acting, and even gets to help write (though not perform in) a masque.  It's not as much theater-related fun for me as his being part of a troupe, but it's something.

I don't want to put people off this book, since my main gripe with it is that it doesn't cater sufficiently to my specific personal obsession with theater.  I was fascinated by the history and at the end of it immediately went off to do a little more research on the actual people involved.  As usual, Frazer has done her research and manages to weave Joliffe seamlessly into her historical tapestry; I'm getting quite an education about English politics in the years preceding the Wars of the Roses just from reading her fiction.  And, as noted above, the murder mystery itself is very good once you get to it.  I do recommend the book, and I'll keep reading the series to find out where she goes with Joliffe in the future.

A shopping link for this book is below; see my post about the first four for links to those.

Comments

[Serge]

This once again provides a fresh setting, but at the price of a horrendous amount of setup before getting around to the actual mystery part: nearly two thirds of the book goes by before we get to the murder and Joliffe's opportunity to play sleuth.

I wonder how many historical mystery series exist because there isn't much market for straight historicals anymore.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I don't know about that. I have a fair amount of historical fiction on my shelves as well, some of it quite recent.

I think the medieval murder mystery trend was mostly spawned by the success of the Cadfael novels. I don't know about other eras.

[Serge]

There are a few series set in the Roman Empire. Besides Lindsey Davis's Falco, there are books by Steven Saylor, and my wife has read a couple of other series too, I think.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I know mysteries and mystery series set in other periods exist, though I've never found any of them as interesting as the medieval ones. I've tried the Falco books and didn't click with them, as well as occasional Regency, Victorian, and Elizabethan ones. What I don't know is whether historical mysteries in general were a going thing before the Cadfael books took off or whether they jump-started the entire genre, not just the medieval ones.