Monastic murder

Dissolution
C. J. Sansom (Viking, 2003)
390 pp. First reading.

Since my recent trip to England I’ve conceived an interest in English history under the Tudors. It was a period of great change in English politics and society, and was the stage for some of the most memorable episodes in all of English history. It was also the period, of course, during which the English Reformation took place, or at the least the period during which it began. (Whether it has yet ended could be a matter for debate.)

This novel, a well written murder mystery, is set in the year 1537, when Henry VIII was on the throne and Thomas Cromwell was initiating a number of aggressive reformist policies. Cromwell commissions one Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked London lawyer, to investigate the murder of one of his men at a monastery on the southern coast. Yes, that’s right: our detective is a hunchbacked lawyer. Are there other kinds?

A monastery is a good setting for a murder mystery. It is a closed community, which limits the scope and forces the author to work with those few characters and circumstances which the setting permits. It is also supposed to be a community united in purpose and animated by fraternal affection, all of which will be severely tested or ruptured by a murder. By its nature it seems to encourage good, tightly-written stories. When you stop to think about it, there have been a fair number of monastic murder mysteries: Ellis Peters made a career on the sleuthing tales of Brother Cadfael, Umberto Eco wrote The Name of the Rose, and recently (if we are willing to stretch the definition of monastery a little) P. D. James wrote her splendid novel Death in Holy Orders. Of course, one must stop short of claiming that a monastery is an especially appropriate place for a murder to occur. That would be quite false.

I enjoyed this novel. Sansom is not a great stylist — he’s not much of a stylist at all — but his prose is crisp, clear, and undistracting, which is arguably what one wants in a story of this sort. He makes some effort to have his characters speak in an authentic 16th-century manner (making frequent use of exclamations like ‘God’s body!’ and ‘God’s blood!’, for example). He draws his characters well, and in several scenes elicits truly affecting dialogue from them. The story also appeals by connecting the events inside the monastery with the wider political and religious revolution taking place.

Most importantly, however, Sansom has created a mystery story that retained its mystery until the story ran its course. As the investigation proceded (and as the bodies piled up), clue after clue was revealed, and one really sensed that the solution was getting closer and closer. When the final clue fell into place, and the earlier ones suddenly appeared in a different light, and of course! of course! how did I miss that? — well, it was very satisfying.