Mystery Monday: The Queen’s Head!

Our book today is The Queen’s Head, a 1988 murder mystery set in the England of Elizabeth I, written by a first-class hack under the pen-name of “Edward Marston” (there’s an in-joke there, but you’d have to be mighty well-read to spot it, and there’s no class of scribblers better-read, of course, than hacks). The Queen’s Head centers on a London acting troupe, Lord Westfield’s Men, although the main star of the book, Nicholas Bracewell, is occupied backstage as the company’s general factotum and manager – and, naturally, as an amateur sleuth.

It’s a taut, economical whodunit, one that opens with a quick, effective description of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and then whisks us straight into the hurly-burly Elizabethan theatrical world. Marston has researched that world with the verve and thoroughness of a working professional who’d hate getting called out on some piggling detail by a dry-as-dust academic, and he brings it alive with well-chosen details on every page.

His most clever move is the conception of Bracewell himself: he’s a friendly, supportive everyman rather than a Sherlock-Holmes-style martinet, and that allows him to be a perfect sounding board for the outsized personalities all around him. And as the action of The Queen’s Head commences, the biggest of those personalities belongs to flashy star-actor Will Fowler, the current toast of the London stage. In scene after scene, Marston wonderfully captures the peculiar allure of that stage-play world (an allure that hasn’t changed from that day to this, one suspects) – as in the early scene where Bracewell and Will Fowler try to convince broken-down old actor Samuel Ruff not to retire to his family farm in godforsaken Norwich. They come right out and ask him, “How can anyone exist without the theatre?”

“Cows have their consolation,” suggested Ruff.

“Leave off this arrant nonsense about a farm!” order his friend with a peremptory wave of his arm. “You’ll not desert us. D’you know what Nick and I talked about as we walked here tonight? We spoke about the acting profession. All its pain and setback and stabbing horror. Why do we put up with it?”

“Why, indeed?” said Ruff gloomily.

“Nick had the answer. On compulsion. It answers a need in us, Sam, and I’ve just realized what that need is.”

“Have you?”

“Danger.”

“Danger?”

“You’ve felt it every bit as much as I have, Sam,” said Fowler with his eye aglow. “The danger of testing yourself in front of a live audience, of risking their displeasure, of taking chances, of being out there with nothing but a gaudy costume and a few lines of verse to hold them. That’s why I do it, Sam, to have that feeling of dread coursing through my veins, to know that excitement, to face that danger! It makes it all worthwhile.”

“Only if you are employed, Will,” observed Ruff.

“Where will you get your danger, Sam?”

“A cow can give a man a nasty kick at times.”

“I’ll give you a nasty kick if you persist like this!”

Only a little while later, Will Fowler is killed in what looks like an ordinary bad tavern brawl, and his dying words embroil Bracewell in the cleverly-constructed mystery at the heart of The Queen’s Head. Marston is an unabashed fan of what used to be the genre’s staple elements – plot-twists, whole shoals of red herrings, and the Clever Reveal – and the whole thing moves along like precision clockwork to an ending that will leave any mystery fan craving more.

Fortunately, there’s more – lots more. I lost count of how many Nicholas Bracewell mysteries Marston ended up writing, but it had to be well over a dozen. And this wasn’t his only ongoing series, not even close: he did one featuring two ship’s detectives during the heyday of the luxury-liner era at the beginning of the 20^th century, and he also did many books in a quite good series featuring two men – a soldier and his whip-smart assistant – investigating location-oriented mysteries brought to light by the compiling of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book. Probably there were lots of other series as well (pen-names being like tattoos – once you’ve broken down and tried it once, you tend to try it many times), but these two stand out in my mind as being especially enjoyable.

But I think the Nicholas Bracewell mysteries ring the truest to both our author’s personal interests and his natural wit. If you’re a fan of Tudor fiction, you should dig up this great old series and treat yourself.