‘The Magician’s Death’

Comparisons may be odious, but since both are fresh in my memory, together with A Poultice for a Healer by Caroline Roe sometime last year and the classic Maurice Druon series The Accursed Kings, I find The Magician’s Death falls short of A Play of Isaac (a murder mystery about strolling players in Oxford) and far short of A Poultice for a Healer (set in a ghetto in mediaeval Spain).

Nevertheless, The Magician’s Death is entertaining, interesting in the period details, suitably gruesome, and completely devoid of sex — apart from the occasional casual reference to some raping here and there. Yet again, we find ourselves in the midst of a series; the hero is Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal, Spymaster for Edward the First, “The Hammer of the Scots,” King of England.

The book opens with two of Corbett’s spies trying to steal a copy of the manuscript of Friar Roger Bacon’s “Secret of Secrets” from the French scholar employed in deciphering Bacon’s coded works for Phillip the Fair, King of France. One spy escapes, the other is caught and bludgeoned to death.

The scene shifts to Corfe Castle on the South Coast of England in the dead of winter where a delegation of French scholars headed by Phillip’s Spymaster, the villainous de Craon, are coming to meet Sir Hugh to try to solve Friar Bacon’s cipher. The isolated Castle is already the scene of a series of horrific murders of young girls that are blamed on a group of outlaws hiding in the depths of the forest. Unlike Robin Hood these outlaws are, in reality, unfortunates caught poaching for the pot to stay the pangs of hunger when harvests failed, and subsequently declared outlaw.

Meanwhile inside the Castle, the French scholars (but not de Craon) are picked off one by one; Corbett himself escapes death by arquebus (crossbow) by a mere whisker, the climax comes when the treacherous French try to take the Castle by stealth and by storm to steal the Key to the English Secrets.

Admittedly, the period atmosphere is well maintained throughout even though the dialogue is modern with no “thee,” “thou,” “peradventure” or mediaeval oaths such as “God’s Teeth” to jar on the sensitive reader. One feels the chill grip of winter, the despair of the outlaws, the discomforts of medieval life. However, the denouement when Sir Hugh collars the traitor in his camp is too contrived.

You’ll find this week’s mediaeval mystery The Magician’s Death by Paul Doherty at Nigel Khan, Bookseller, PricePlaza, Ellerslie Plaza, Gulf City and The Falls Westmall.