It is London in the 1870s and it is common practice for all men who can afford it to head for a high-class prostitute when they can. One of these prostitutes is Sugar, who has the added benefit of doing things that other girls generally won’t do. William Rackham, the heir of Rackham Perfumeries, hears of Sugar and seeks her out. Thrilled by what he finds, he moves Sugar into her own lodgings, for which he pays, so that he can ensure Sugar is his and his alone. Sugar, a clever, street-wise teenager, soon finds a way to establish herself in Rackham’s own home, as a governess to his daughter, Sophie.

London, Michel Faber

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Yashim, a eunuch formerly attached to the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul (as a eunuch not the only thing he was formerly attached to!), is summoned by the Sultan to look into the mysterious death of a guardsman whose remains are found in a huge cauldron. One death soon becomes two and before long Yashim finds himself at the heart of something very suspicious. With the help of Stainslav Palewski the bumbling Polish ambassador and Preen – a high class hooker for want of a better description, Yashim tries to find the culprit before another murder is committed and in doing so unearths a twenty-year grievance….

Set in Ottoman Istanbul in the 1830s, I suppose one would class “The Janissary Tree” as a historical detective novel. The attention to detail and the authenticity seems hard to fault and knowing that the author Jason Goodwin is an expert on things Ottoman ought to persuade the reader that things are correct.

Jason Goodwin

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“The Keeper of Secrets” is as a Regency novel with a difference. In this book, Judith Cutler has successfully combined the dark world of crime writing with an era that we perceive as being almost universally polite, delicate and graceful. The Regency period is, after all, the world that Jane Austen inhabited. The result is an unusual novel that is an interesting combination of historical mystery and social comment that shows the bleaker side of this undoubtedly elegant period.

It is 1810, and the rural backwaters of Moreton St Jude, Warwickshire, are about to get a rude awakening in the form of the new parson, Tobias Campion. Young and freshly out of Cambridge University, Tobias marks himself as very different from previous incumbents on his first night in the village, standing up for housemaid Lizzie Woodman’s honour when a drunken guest of local aristocrat Lady Elham (“a distant but generous cousin of my mother”) attempts to molest her.

Judith Cutler, Regency period

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In 1917, as the First World War raged across Europe, artist Kathleen Scott was busy fighting her own battles for the memory of her late husband, Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Following the tragic events of the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic, one-time popular hero Scott is widely treated as a man of poor judgement and foresight, who lost the pole to Norway, who brought disaster on those depending on him, and Kathleen seeks desperately to publish a new book that will re-establish him as a great man. In this vision she partially succeeded, with him becoming a hero once more before it later become fashionable in a more sceptical age to condemn the man, instead raising Sir Ernest Shackleton – who never reached the pole but also never lost a man – to the position of Antarctic hero in his place.

Robert Falcon Scott, Robert Ryan, South Pole

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Painting  Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis is a great Italian historical yarn with plenty of twists.

Background to the Plot

Lisa di Antonio Gherardini Gioconndo, who is known simply as Madonna Lisa, sets the scene for this novel in the prologue. (Of course, if you are of common class, you will know her as Mona Lisa.) In the Florence of 1490, she is just coming up to the celebration of her 18th birthday, and she requests what I think is an unusual present.

Jeanne Kalogridis, Painting the Mona Lisa

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Having the Builders in by Reay Tannahill combines two of my favourite fiction categories – historical and humour.

Have you ever tried to live in a home where builders are undertaking major work? If so you will probably relate to a lot of the problems described in the book, even though it is set hundreds of years ago. Hopefully this hasn’t involved any sudden deaths though, or the threat of an invasion from across The Channel.

Most books by Reay Tannahill are serious looks at history, whether fact (including Sex in History and Food in History) or historical fiction (including The Seventh Son about Richard III and Fatal Majesty about Mary Queen of Scots). Then, towards the end of her life, she wrote two great humorous historical fiction books. Sadly, she died in 2007, aged 77.

Having the Builders In, Reay Tannahill

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I remember once asking an English teacher of mine what he thought constituted a good book. He replied that it was a book where getting to the end of it was not enough – you wanted to know what happened to the characters beyond the last page, for the rest of their lives. I have always found this explanation to be a simple, yet satisfying one. With so many books you get to the end, put it down, and never think of it ever again; they were entertaining enough, but instantly forgettable. With others, though, you find yourself reaching the end of the story and desperately wanting to know more. “Fatherland”, for me, certainly falls into this second category. It may not be the most accomplished or the most original literature I have ever read, but it had that X factor that compelled me to read on, and to try and work out what happened after the book had finished. I have been left with the story hovering around my mind since I finished reading it; I can’t help but wonder about the futures of the people I have been reading about.
“Fatherland” opens as all good crime thrillers do, with the discovery of a body. In this case, it is of an elderly man who is washed up on the lake shore near one of Berlin’s most exclusive areas,

Nazis, Robert Harris, thriller

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Bernard Cornwell will doubtless be best known amongst you for the best selling Sharpe series of novels – you know, the ones that Sean Bean starred in as a Napoleonic era soldier when they were adapted for TV a few years back. Following on from this great success, he has now turned his talents towards a trilogy of novels (The Grail Quest) set during the 14th century (the other two books being “Vagabond” and “Heretic”); this review is on the first of the series, “Harlequin”. You may find it surprising that I am reading these at all, given their reputation as being very much “bloke’s books”; Cornwell’s preference for writing about warfare while relishing every grisly detail of it does seem to appeal to an almost exclusively male readership, I must admit. My interest in these books, though, comes from the fact that their central character is an English longbow archer. So what? Well, having previously dabbled in archery myself, I do have something of an interest in the history of the bow, and as anyone with even a passing interest in Medieval arms will know, the 14th century is the golden era of the longbow.

adventure, Bernard Cornwell, grail

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