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Elizabeth Eyre: Detection in the Italian Renaissance Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox Elizabeth Eyre is the author of six Italian Renaissance Whodunnits that follow the escapades of the adventurer Sigismondp and his servant Benno as they investigate murder and conspiracy in the Renaissance courts of both fictional and real Italian cities.I These novels contain a fast paced succession of seemingly unrelated murders and other crimes that pose a direct threat to the society in which they take place. By the end of each novel, Sigismondo traces these seemingly unrelated crimes to a single perpetrator who, in each case, meets an appropriate end, thereby allowing social order to be restored. In each novel, Sigismondo adopts a wide variety of roles and crosses the accepted social boundaries of his society. Bermo plays the role of the idiot with undying devotion both to Sigismondo and to his dog Biondello. With this configuration of the plot and the main characters, Eyre's novels follow the pattern of much modern detective fiction. These novels are not historical fiction in the sense that they portray their characters playing roles in wellknown historical events or interacting with historical figures. Rather, these novels represent historical fiction because their settings are inspired by Renaissance history and supported by the addition of historical details. In the few cases where Eyre bases her characters on well-known historical figures or events, the relationship is quite loose; she transforms them freely to suit the purposes of her novels. In this paper, I will first explore the ways that Eyre draws upon the conventions of the modern detective novel. Second, I will examine the ways that she uses Renaissance humanism and approaches to war to support the settings of her novels and, in a few cases, adapts historical events to suit the needs of her mysteries. Although Eyre's novels are set in Italy during the Renaissance, they lie firmly within the tradition of the modem mystery story. The genre of the mystery story is dominated by conventional formulae that originated with Edgar Allan Poe. As Dorothy L. Sayers pointed out in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, "It is doubtful whether there are more than half a dozen deceptions in the mystery monger's bag of tricks, and we shall find that Poe has got most of them" (60).2 Sayers points to plot devices in Poe's works such as the mystery of the apparently locked room, the ruse of the most obvious place, and the solution by means of the most unlikely person. Eyre uses all of these devices in her novels. For example, in the Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin attempts to solve a murder that took place in the 111 112 The Detective as Historian locked room. Investigating the possible ways that the murderer could have entered this room provides the stage for a virtuoso display of his detective abilities. A locked room plays a similar role in Dirge for a Doge (1996), when Niccolo Ermolin is stabbed in the study that he always kept locked. The various means of entry into this apparently locked room provide a venue for Sigismondo's display of his own investigative abilities. Eyre also uses the idea of the locked room in a slightly different manner in the Death of the Duchess (1991). In this case, Sigismondo must penetrate the apparently locked palace dungeons to free the unjustly condemned Leandro Bandini before his execution.3 The challenge of gaining entry for himself, rather than determining how a murderer gained access provides the stage for Sigismondo 's display of his abilities. The ruse of the most obvious place first appears in Poe's Purloined Letter, which tells the story of a government minister who had stolen a sensitive letter. He hid the letter from the extensive police searches by simply leaving it on his mantle as if it were an ordinary letter. The key to this ruse, as Dupin points out, is that the police are so certain that they are looking for a hidden letter, that they fail to even consider those letters that are in plain sight. This ruse makes several appearances in Eyre's novels. For example, in Axe for the Abbot (1995), Sigismondo is drawn into a family feud about a jewel called La Feconda, thought to have magical powers to bring sons and riches to its owner. In this novel, two different branches of the Pantera family have engaged in a series of reciprocal murders while...

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