Sharon Kay Penman, Prince of Darkness (Putnam, 2005)

A fiction based on that which is historical record is a tricky beast. Some writers get it right, most do not. Over the years, I've sampled dozens of novels that attempted to build a believable story off events and characters that actually existed. Setting aside works involving time travel where twisting history is the raison d'etre for the tale being told, my firm opinion -- subject to change if need be -- is that telling a fiction which does justice to the historical record is damn hard! Time travel as a plot device frees the writer from being historically accurate; basing your characters in an era as if they were real living members of that place and time has quite the opposite effect.

An even neater trick is mixing real and never real as James Goldman did in his Robin Hood script, Robin and Marian, where Richard the Lion-Hearted meets Robin Hood. To a certain extent Penman is doing that here as well as her protagonist, Justin de Quincy, is, according to her, a composite of actual historical personages, but not one that actually existed. Poul Anderson, Kage Baker, and Fritz Leiber in their time tripping based series aren't writing in a history, but rather are playing with it; Sharon Kay Penman, James Goldman, and Ellis Peters aren't as free to rewrite history as the first group must be. I as a reader must believe in both the characters and that they are a believable part of the historical period the writer has set them in.

Sharon Kay Penman is without a doubt one of the better practitioners of crafting fictions where the historical record, if the writer is not careful, can be a true curse. However even she gets the history better than the story she's attempting to do.

The Queen's Man was the first of a murder mysteries centered around Justin de Quincy, a bastard child who as the title notes is the Queen's Man, the Queen being Eleanor of Aquataine in her later years. Despite his low status in royal circles -- excepting of course that Eleanor trusts him completely for reasons that escape me. Now I'm must quote Maria Nutick who reviewed the first three installments, bless her! in this series as she echoes my concerns: 'In a nutshell, this is the problem; I've just described all three books, without spoilers, and yet I've told you just about all there is to tell you about the series. While Penman's historical novels are detailed to the nth degree, this series seems to be more of a repository for leftover ideas from her main work than anything else. Her romantic and florid writing style lends itself to the epic; these short books seem too short for the subject matter. Machinations which played out over many years are mentioned, but all subtlety is lost. The mysteries themselves are standard whodunnits, which frankly could have been set in any era and but for a few small details been just as acceptable.' She goes on to note, and I fully agree, that 'Dragon's Lair, though, was a pleasant surprise, expecting as I was another throwaway airplane read. Was it the five year interval between the second and third books that made the difference? The writing in this third installment is vastly improved -- the mystery more interesting, the plot more intriguing, the characters taking on lives of their own. I actually cared what happened to Justin! I seethed at the villain's cruelty! I found myself looking forward to the possibility of a fourth book, an anticipation which neither the first nor the second book inspired.' Dragon's Lair was indeed a wonderful read, one of the best novels I've had the pleasure to read.

Prince of Darkness is Eleanor's nickname for her son, John, and he is the character around which this mystery is centered. (If there indeed is a center to this tale -- a proposition which could be debated in my opinion.) John may or may not have created treason in attempt to seize the Throne before Richard II is released from captivity. Eleanor charges Justin as the Queen's Man to investigate this charge. Now if any of you read James Goldman's The Lion in The Winter which is set a decade before this novel, you know that historians and writers alike agree that no love was lost between the brothers. Nor was Eleanor above putting petty politics above family concerns. Bloodletting, by sword or by word, was the family sport for those who history would call the Plantagenets (Henry's illegitimate son Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, also stood by him the whole time and alone among his sons attended on Henry's death-bed. He does not figure in this series in any meaningful manner.) What is lacking here is the terse, interesting tale which for me made Dragon's Lair one of the finest novels I'd ever read.

On the other hand, Prince of Darkness is quite unfortunately simply not at all engaging. Neither the plot, which I will not detail slim as it is, or the setting, mostly France in this novel, were sufficiently interesting to hold my attention in the way a good novel does. I read Dragon's Lair over a period of time not much longer than a cold winters afternoon and will re-read it again soon; Prince of Darkness took me three evenings to finish, and I will not re-read it.