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Michael Clynes: The Recollections of Shallot David N. Eldridge, Theron M. Westervelt, Edward L. Meek The door swings open, the ghosts beckon me back along the gallery oftime, back to London when Henry and Wolsey had the kingdom in the grip oftheir avaricious fingers. Oh yes, back to subtle ploys and clever plans! To treason , murder and death by a thousand stings. I open the door and Murder, evil-faced and bloody-handed, stands waiting to greet me. -Michael Clynes (A Brood ofVipers 6) As revealed by the melodramatic note of dark foreboding with which Sir Roger Shallot reaches back into his past, the six volumes of his 'memoirs ' published to date are no ordinary detective mysteries. Rather, they are nightmares. Through the recollections of Shallot-a sixteenth-century rogue made good-author Michael Clynes draws the reader into an England teetering on the brink of the Henrican Reformation, where murder is only a precursor to the terrible bloodshed associated with Henry VIII's divorce. Almost every death is intimately tied to the "subtle ploys," intrigues, and rivalries of the Renaissance courts of Europe. You do not normally read a detective story set some four hundred years ago and expect the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the Watergate scandal to come to mind, but this is precisely the response which Michael Clynes provokes. Quite simply, he is to the sixteenth century what Oliver Stone is to Cold War America: a true advocate of the conspiracy school of history. Shallot is drawn into the conspiratorial machinations of Henry VIn through his friendship with Benjamin Daunbey. As the nephew of Henry's chancellor, Lord Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, it is Daunbey who is the real sleuth in the mysteries. He combines an interest in history, archaeology, logic, and pedagogy, with a quiet, chivalrous demeanour that hides his true intensity of feeling. In comparison, Shallot is "a veritable rogue, born and bred," with coarse desires and crude intellect, but possessing quick wit, street-wise knowledge, and a heightened sense of self-preservation, all of which serve him well in the adventures he faces (Gallows 49). From the first novel, The White Rose Murders (1991), set in 1521 at the court of Henry VIII's sister, Margaret Tudor, Shallot and Daunbey demonstrate both their ability to reveal the murderers and to uncover corruption at the highest levels. They also reveal their sense of discretion, which is called for when it appears that the king's sister may have murdered her husband, James IV of 156 Michael Clynes 157 Scotland! These skills ensure that the duo are, at least for the next two years, regularly employed as special envoys and investigators by king and cardinal. Regarded on the level of detective fiction, Clynes's books tend to be rather contrived and formulaic, heavily reliant on variations of locked-room mysteries. Daunbey and Shallot wend their way through numerous red herrings , with supposedly enigmatic riddles to unravel, and people being inconveniently killed just as they are about to reveal key information. As is traditional in such plots, the murderers and conspirators are eventually unmasked from a line-up of suspects-although locations such as the Tower of London and the English embassy in Maubisson are substituted for the Edwardian drawing room. These formulaic elements are particularly noticeable when the Shallot memoirs are read in conjunction with the other books written by the prolific Paul Doherty-for whom Michael Clynes is one of many noms-de-plume.1 However, as the author notes, "murder in medieval times lends itself to the classic style of detective story." "You don't have police procedures, you don't have pathology. The detective has to solve the murder or the mystery by the application of logic and observation alone" (Rennison 46). Clynes points to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as a major influence in his conception of detective fiction, and the "lockedroom " mystery certainly lends itself to such deductive reasoning-Clynes considers the form to be the "ultimate puzzle for the detective writer."2 And, in fairness, when it comes to choosing a method of murder his inventiveness has developed as the series of books has progressed. The Gallows Murders (1995), for example, features four royal executioners, each being "killed in a way prescribed by law for certain felons" by the means with which they themselves carried out "judicial murder" (59). Clynes plays upon the assured vague knowledge of readers about the period, and in A Brood of Vipers (1994...

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