Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T01:31:39.379Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Cloister and the Crime: Medieval Monks in Modern Murder-Mysteries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford

Extract

The monastic day continued at its steady, unhurried, unvarying pace. Vespers was sung in church, followed by a light supper of bread and fruit, washed down with a glass of ale.

Kenelm and Elaf were absent from the table, however. Hungry by the time of Vespers, they were famished when the bell for Compline summoned the monks to the last service of the day. As they shuffled off to the dormitory with the other novices, they were feeling the pangs with great intensity.

Escaping the dormitory to look for something to eat as soon as their peers were asleep, the novices are disturbed and take refuge in the bell tower. There Elaf falls across an obstruction and lets out a yell of sheer terror: he is lying across the stiff, stinking body of a man. ‘The missing Brother Nicholas had at last been found’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Marston, Edward, The Owls of Gloucester (London, 2000), 4, 8.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. 27, 272.

3 Binyon, T. J., ‘Murder will out’: The Detective in Fiction (Oxford, 1989), 125 Google Scholar; Hoyser, Catherine E., ‘Historical Mystery’, in Herbert, Rosemary, ed., The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford, 1999), 20910.Google Scholar

4 Oleksiw, Susan, ‘The British Clerical Milieu’, in Herbert, , ed., Oxford Companion, 745 Google Scholar; Catherine Aird, ‘Clerical Sleuth’, ibid. 75–6, who gives examples of sleuths in other religious traditions, including the Methodist Revd C. P. ‘Con’ Randolph and various detecting rabbis, plus a Tibetan Buddhist monk. See also Binyon, ‘Murder will out’, 64–6; Ashley, Mike, ‘Mistress of the Medieval Mystery’, Million: the Magazine of Popular Fiction, no. 4 (July-August 1991), 611.Google Scholar

5 Auden, W. H., ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ (1948), repr. in Winks, Robin W., ed., Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980), 1524 Google Scholar, at 18.

6 Peters, Ellis, The Sanctuary Sparrow (London, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Knight, Stephen, ‘The Golden Age’, in Priestman, Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge, 2003), 7794 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Breen, John L., ‘Golden Age Traditions’, in Herbert, , ed., Oxford Companion, 1868.Google Scholar For a survey locating golden-age fiction in the context of contemporary historical writing, see Rzepka, Charles J., Detective Fiction (London, 2005), 15175.Google Scholar For a wider discussion of the formula of the classic detective story, see Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, IL, 1976), 80105.Google Scholar

8 Peters, Ellis, The Devil’s Novice (London, 1983; paperback edn 1985), 23.Google Scholar

9 Frazer, Margaret, The Novice’s Tale (New York, 1992; Berkley Prime Crime edn 1993). 1.Google Scholar

10 Newman, Sharan, Death Comes as Epiphany (New York, 1993; paperback edn 1995), 59.Google Scholar

11 Peters, Ellis, The Hermit of Eyton Forest (London, 1987; paperback edn 1988).Google Scholar

12 Peters, Ellis, Monk’s-Hood (London, 1980; paperback edn 1984), 37, 222.Google Scholar

13 Frazer, Novice’s Tale, 228.

14 For example Peters, Ellis, One Corpse too Many (London, 1979)Google Scholar; The Leper of St Giles (London, 1981).

15 Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who was previously a coroner’s officer.

16 Franklin, Ariana, Mistress of the Art of Death (London, 2007; paperback edn 2008)Google Scholar. Ariana Franklin was the pen-name of Diana Norman, a British former journalist turned novelist.

17 Auden, ‘Guilty Vicarage’, 24.

18 Examples set in contemporary eras include James, P. D., The Black Tower (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Death in Holy Orders (London, 2001); Paretsky, Sara, Killing Orders (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; see Hawkins, David G., ‘Whodunit Theology’, AThR 71 (1989), 27380 Google Scholar, at 278–80.

19 Auden, ‘Guilty Vicarage’, 19.

20 Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London, 1981).Google Scholar

21 Judith Maltby, ‘Sacrilege and the Sacred in Revolutionary England’, unpublished paper read at a conference at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, 20–22 July 2006: ‘Icons and Iconoclasts: The Long Seventeenth Century, 1603 to 1714’.

22 Punter, David, The Literature of Terror I: The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edn (London, 1996), 94.Google Scholar Cardinal Gasquet, of course, thought otherwise: Knowles, David, Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘The Twilight of the Monks’, in idem, Historical Essays (London, 1958), 6773.Google Scholar

23 Punter, David, ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’, in Hogle, Jerrold E., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, 2002), 10523 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 118.

24 Hull, Anthony, ‘Walter Scott and Medievalism’, in idem, English Romanticism (London, 2000), 10922 Google Scholar, at 115–19; Alexander, Michael, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2007), 5064 Google Scholar, esp. 58–9 for critique of Scott’s sectarianism in Marmion.

25 Sansom, C. J., Dissolution (London, 2003), 13.Google Scholar Sansom is a British writer.

26 Fraser, Antonia, Quiet as a Nun (London, 1977), 9.Google Scholar

27 Ker, Ian, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, IN, 2003).Google Scholar

28 Letter of Knowles to Adrian Morey, October 1929, quoted in Morey, David Knowles: A Memoir (London, 1979), 120.

29 Southern, Richard, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

30 Membership of the National Trust expanded sharply during the 1960s and 1970s: ‘National Trust Timeline’, <http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-trust/w-thecharity/w-history_trust-timeline.htm>, accessed 19 July 2010.

31 Ortenberg, V., In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London, 2006), 191.Google Scholar

32 Helen Cam noted how sympathetically medieval nunneries were portrayed in Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner that Held Them (London, 1948), concerning a fourteenth-century Norfolk nunnery, and H. F. M. Prescott, The Man on a Donkey (London, 1952), which portrays the nunnery of Marrick on the eve of the Dissolution: Historical Novels (London, 1961).

33 Edwin Ernest Christian and Blake Lindsay, ‘The Habit of Detection: The Medieval Monk as Detective in the Novels of Ellis Peters’, Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992), 276–89, at 284–5. Most revealing of theological themes among Ellis Peters’s Cadfael books are The Confession of Brother Haluin (1988), The Heretic’s Apprentice (1989), The Potter’s Field (1989) and Brother Cadfael’s Penance (1994).

34 Quoted in Henderson, Lesley, ed., Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL, 1991), 848.Google Scholar On the morality of Peters’s writing, see Harriott, John F. X., ‘Detective Extraordinary’, The Tablet 240, no. 7631 (11 October 1986), 1066.Google Scholar

35 Hawkins, ‘Whodunit Theology’, 276–7.

36 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance, 137.

37 Christian and Lindsay, ‘Habit of Detection’, 286. Among contemporary monastic sleuths Sister Mary Helen, a nun at Mount St Francis College for Women in San Francisco, stands out, created by Sister Carol Anne O’Marie, a Sister of St Joseph of Carondelet who lives in Oakland, California; Sister Mary Helen appeared first in A Novena for Murder (London, 2006).

38 Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Bruce, Steve, Cod is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002).Google Scholar

39 Martin, David, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization (London, 1969), 106.Google Scholar

40 Ibid. 107–8.