A Murder of Crows

September 1592 – and the redoubtable Sergeant Dodd is still in London with that dashing courtier Sir Robert Carey, dealing with the fall-out from their earlier adventures. Carey urgently needs to get back to Carlisle where he is the Deputy Warden and the raiding season is about to begin. However, there are complications in the way. His powerful father, Henry, Lord Hunsdon, son of the other Boleyn girl, Mary and her paramour young Henry VIII, wants him to solve the mystery of a badly decomposed corpse from the Thames that has washed up on Her Majesty’s Privy Steps.

Meanwhile, although he hates London, Sergeant Dodd has decided that he will not go north until he has taken a suitable revenge for his mistreatment by the Queen’s Vice Chamberlain, Thomas Heneage. Carey’s father wants him to sue – but none of the lawyers in London will take the brief against such a dangerous courtier. Then a mysterious young lawyer with a pock-marked face offers to help Dodd, with suspicious eagerness. Nobody knows who that balding young would-be poet and lover William Shakespeare might be working for, if he knows himself. And then, just as Carey is resigning himself to the delay, the one person he really does not want to see again arrives in London to stir everything up.  

With the River Thames for a freeway and the dark streets of London full of people up to no good, Sergeant Dodd has to help Carey find the identity of the corpse and who murdered him, while bringing a little taste of the Borders to his dealings with Heneage.

The Historical Background for A Murder of Crows.

In his memoirs Sir Robert Carey speaks of his parents, Lord and Lady Hunsdon, with respect and affection, although he says very little about his mother who died in 1607. She was born Anne Morgan to a Hertfordshire knight called Sir Thomas Morgan and Anne Whitney. Her sister Sybilla married Sir Hugh Trevannion of Caerhays Castle in Cornwall and so was the mother of Elizabeth Widdrington nee Trevannion who ultimately became Carey's wife.

Since Caerhays is only a couple of days' travel by ship from Falmouth Bay, it's highly likely that Lady Hunsdon might have visited the deplorable and powerful Killigrew family whose privateering and other shady dealings in the English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, and Irish Sea occasionally errupted into public scandal.

In the book Lady Hunsdon's friend Kate Killigrew is a composite of various redoubtable ladies of that family. Given Lady Hunsdon's surname of Morgan, no self-respecting historical novelist could be exptected to resist the temptation to make her one of the extraordinary band of matriarchal pirates, including Mrs Grainne O'Malley, who conducted armed trade and profitable larceny all around the coasts of Cornwall, Ireland, and Wales. Queen Elizabeth seems not to have seen any need to take action about it, despite the protests of pillaged French, Spanish and Dutch sailors. Given the lock that the Killigrews had on the Cornish law courts and the general corruption of the county, it's possible that Elizabeth felt there was no action she could usefully take.

This is the background for P.F. Chisholm's extraordinary fifth mystery featuring Sir Robert Carey, who in 1589 walked for a wager from London to Berwick (342 miles) in twelve days, and then in 1603, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, rode on horseback from London to Edinburgh in sixty hours to bring the news to King James VI of Scotland that he was now King Kames I of England.

Publishers Weekly

Set in 1592, Chisholm's fifth Sir Robert Carey mystery (after 2000's A Plague of Angels) includes a couple of potentially interesting supporting characters, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, but the playwrights come across as mere caricatures. Not much more developed are the two leads—Carey, the son of Anne Boleyn's sister, Mary, and thus cousin to Queen Elizabeth, and his sidekick, Sergeant Dodd, whose heavy dialect (“whit can ye dae to show us ye're no' one o' his kinship come tae trap us in ambush?”) can be tough to follow. Carey and Dodd seek legal representation to bring a case of unlawful imprisonment against the queen's vice chamberlain, look into the identity of an unclaimed corpse found in the Thames, and probe some shady land deals in Cornwall. Unfortunately, the multiple story lines fail to gel, and the plot drags for long stretches. Fans of Elizabethan historicals would do better with Rory Clements's Martyr (2009). (June)

Patricia Finney has been writing since she was seven, writing novels and screenplays since the age of fifteen and a published author since she was 18. She has a degree in Modern History from Oxford University – where she also met her late husband, American lawyer Christopher Perry. Since then, she has had a chequered career in which she has written a weekly column for a Fleet Street paper, edited a medical journal, won the top BBC Radio Drama Prize for her play A ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS, sold advertising, been a dreadful secretary, and most recently opened, run and sold a coffee shop called Words. She also lived in Spain for two and a half years.  

She has published fifteen novels, including three Elizabethan thrillers, two childrens’ books told by a dog (I, Jack series), the first books of the Lady Grace series for children and, of course, the Robert Carey series of crime novels set in Elizabethan England.

At the moment she is researching the sixth Carey story, writing another Elizabethan crime novel, rewriting scripts and having a whale of a time broadcasting Word Warriors, a literary show on her local community radio station (www.thesourcefm.co.uk).