'Dial M for Medieval'
Jenna Mead (jenna.mead@uwa.edu.au)
Anne McKendry's new book, Medieval Crime Fiction. A Critical Overview, came in as one of five nominees shortlisted for this year's Edgar Allan Poe Award (popularly called the Edgars) in the Critical/Biography category. This is two kinds of big deal. Australians have made rare but distinguished appearances at the Edgars. Charlotte Jay [pseud. Geraldine Halls] took out the inaugural Best Novel of the Year, 1954, with Beat Not the Bones; Raymond Chandler reached Jay's benchmark, in the following year, with The Long Goodbye. The Edgar for Best Critical/Biographical Work has been awarded since 1977 and McKendry is the first Australian in the category, so her book is already a stand-out. More critically, though, the Edgars are awarded by crime fiction's learned society, the Mystery Writers of America. These are the people who know what's what and where the bodies are buried. So, a hat-tip from the MWA is a prize in and of itself.
McKendry is a medievalist with a PhD and another book behind her, meaning that she has dibs on her subject matter and the experience to produce this first critical overview of the surprisingly popular genre of medieval crime fiction. The genre is now too extensive for a short book like this one and so McKendry's study is strictly limited to crime fiction and medieval western Europe. 'Critical overview' means this isn't just a survey but an analysis of the origin, forms, strengths and limitations of the genre. Medieval crime fiction arrives as a serious object of inquiry.
Definition is essential in this kind of book and McKendry clears the ground with a crisp distinction between crime fiction written by medievals (another topic entirely) and crime fiction written through the medieval world and its inhabitants. As a genre, it is unique in combining 'medievalism, the historical novel and crime fiction' (42). The paradigm is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980 in Italian, 1983 in English) though Edith Parteger, aka 'Ellis Peters,' predates Eco with a series of 20 novels (1974-1995), featuring Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine monk turned sleuth.
Prime face, medieval crime fiction just should not work. Crime fiction's traditional drivers are the highly developed ratiocination of Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and the forensic science typified by autopsy, and they're mobilized by the twin régimes of modernity and secularization. (Witness the egregious failure that is G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown.) Its spaces resonate as accessible and authentic for us. It's the social and political economies of late capitalism that produce the apparatus of the police procedural, the anguished subjectivity of the hard-boiled private investigator, the gutsy smarts of the feminist operator. Though crime fiction is capacious, its language, conventions and emotional registers are immediately recognizable and permanent fixtures on backlists and the next wave of bestsellers.
McKendry turns to Umberto Eco to theorize the medievalism that gives these books their edge: the characters, temporality, locations, set-up. We have been dreaming of the Middle Ages, he argues in Travels in Hyperreality, since becoming modern; in postmodernity, we live in a neomedieval age; we need only to decide which version of the Middle Ages we invoke and he gives us ten options, ten medieval imaginaries. The cultural work of medievalism, Eco surmises, is to negotiate a way through our anxieties. It's the ubiquity of medievalism — evidenced wherever we need a medieval past — that substantiates the credibility of Eco's insights.
From here, McKendry's overview opens out to map just how medieval crime fiction works, usefully illustrated from numerous of the more than 150 authors currently publishing in the genre. Five of her six chapters are thematic and her method is to identify in medieval crime fiction what is recognizable from traditional crime fiction. The hard-boiled detective epitomised by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe — operating as a loner, pitted against corrupted systems of law, trawling the mean streets, trusting no-one, for whom failure is normal and justice is piecemeal — is instantly identifiable in the ex-crusaders, ex-Templars, lawyers, surgeons, scribes, bookmakers, peddlers and bailiffs who hunt criminals and solve crimes in the secular world of Eco's 'barbaric' Middle Ages.
Institutionalized corruption is often represented by deceitful sheriffs and/or the intricate and fast-paced alliances of medieval politics and/or the operations of ecclesiastical imperium — each with its own kind of decadence — threatening the social order and treating justice as their first casualty. Power, money, greed, the ethics of cruel: we've seen it all before. This is where the medieval crime writer's dedication to research either persuades or, less successfully, overpowers the crime plot. As McKendry convincingly shows, the constant here is the medieval detective, male or female, secular or religious, who is the reader's likeable, empathetic, occasionally infuriating guide through the lived experience of the medieval world. This relationship with the reader works because medievalism is a two-way street between the past and the present. Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma is a proto-feminist detective; Paul C. Doherty's Brother Athelstan may be a reluctant detective but he is innately egalitarian; Caroline Roe's Isaac the Blind, the genre's only major Jewish detective, is a liberal, astutely tracking the fragility of Jewish-Muslim-Christian tolerance under pressure from religious extremism and consequent migration.
In its wide-ranging scope, intelligent organization and encouraging accessibility, this book is also an excellent teaching resource. The data is both cogent and thorough. The underlying arguments for medieval crime fiction as a genre are persuasive, not only from the trajectory of McKendry's scrutiny but also from the sheer heft of the data. The methodology is as instructive as the analysis and students, coming to the genre for the first time, or teachers looking, for points of entry into a field they intuit as a creative and expansive version of medievalism, will find their reading fully supported. McKendry's taxonomy gies us the low-down on an emergent field.
Medieval Crime Fiction has a lot of smart things to say about this genre but absolutely spot-on is to emphasise the allure of the medieval past, with its intriguing characters, tangible details and persistent cruelties, its traction in picking up on today's cultural anxieties and, above all, the challenge to the triumph of forensic science and technology. Yes, medieval crime shows off its writers' hardcore research into bottomless historical detail; yes, there's an essential anachronism in the whole business of medieval detective work; yes, perhaps authenticity is at risk from postmodern scepticism among other ironies. But the detective, whatever his or her secular or religious garb, operating inside or outside the religious house or royal court, in the world of business, commerce or the landed gentry, on the street or in the back alley, offers readers the satisfying nostalgia of a thinking, feeling, personable sherlock sharing the intimacy of needing, sometimes desperately, to solve the crime, restore order, and offer redemption to fallible characters ranging from the (often) nuanced to the (sometimes) corny. For all its historical apparatus, medieval crime fiction translates the past into a compelling, if usually conservative, emotional logic. Sobering, isn't it? We're drowning in metadata and Goodreads tells us we're reaching for medieval crime fiction that has none of that.
Jenna Mead
Jenna Mead is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and is currently co-editing Geoffrey chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe for Cambridge University Press. Her latest contribution to medievalism studies is an essay on medievalism and Indigenous ceremonial in the Gulf country of northern Australia: ‘Medievalism on Country,’ in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
