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Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
When you find an author whose name is given with just the initials there is a good chance it is a woman and my guess is that some male marketing guru working in publishing decided that men don't like to be seen reading fiction written by women. I would be surprised if that was still true if indeed it was ever the case. Any discerning reader would soon see that fiction by women usually offers more depth and a deep understanding of motivation.
In this case S.J. Parris is Stephanie Jane Merritt, one time literary editor and feature writer for various newspapers and, as it turns out, an excellent writer of historical detective fiction.
I have tended to avoid this genre since reading the splendid Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom (a man – just to confound my theory) as he sets a high bar and having browsed a few other authors ploughing this furrow I usually decide to wait for the next Shardlake.
I now realise that having discovered S.J. Parris I had made a make a mistake. I downloaded Treachery in a hurry because I was completely out of reading material and needed something to skim on the Tube. I was expecting an average potboiler but instead I was delighted to find an amusing, literate piece of crime fiction featuring Giordano Bruno, an Italian heretic hiding in London, friend to Sir Philip Sidney and commissioned to solve mysteries for Francis Walsingham, the principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth.
The story is both entertaining and gripping with a very good sense of time and period while all the clues unearthed by Bruno are shared with the reader and plausible red herrings add to the mystery. The history is light but accurate and the language, while modern, doesn't grate or seem out of place. Quite an achievement in itself.
As this was an impulse purchase I landed in the middle of a series – this is number four, I believe. Nevertheless I seemed to absorb the entire Bruno backstory without really noticing which is testimony to the quality of the writing. I will be reading the others soon, starting with book one this time. Highly recommended and available on Amazon for £6.47 in paperback and £4.99 for the Kindle download.
Historical Note: Giordano Bruno really existed with just enough unknown about his life to allow S.J. Harris some creative leeway to turn him into a detective. He was born in 1548 and was a Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and poet. He came to England in 1583 and certainly became acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney and also lectured at Oxford.
There is a theory that he did spy on Catholic plotters using the pseudonym Henry Fagot at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham who also features in the novels. After returning to Italy he was tried and found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake in 1600.