from Medieval Academy News (Spring 2003)

Are Medieval Mysteries Relevant in a Post-9/11 World?
by Alan Gordon

My title may contain a false premise. It assumes that medieval mysteries were relevant in a pre-9/11 world. Were they? I like to think so, and not just because I write them.

When I began the research on what would eventually become my first published novel, I was blissfully unaware of the demands of the mystery marketplace. I had read The Name of the Rose, I had heard vaguely of Brother Cadfael, but I had no idea that there were over twenty other authors working this neck of the woods. All I knew is that I had an idea, one that seized my brain and would not let go. One that, to my mingled delight and dismay, would require me to fill in one of the gaps in my education. It was to take the jester Feste from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and put him in the middle of a mystery.

So, in December 1993, I started teaching myself medieval history. However, I approached it as a writer rather than as a budding medievalist. I had a specific location in mind. The book would be set in Dalmatia, which is what the play’s Illyria became. I knew that I wanted it in a time in which there were jesters, and before gunpowder came to Europe. So, I worked through general histories looking for significant events in Dalmatia. And then I found the invasion of Zara as a precursor to the Fourth Crusade.

The Fourth Crusade became my world, the context and dominating force in my characters’ lives. A wonderfully cynical enterprise, the diversion of an army of zealots from liberating the Holy Land to conquer Christian cities instead. Whether you take the Venetianist or Byzantinist view of its causes (I favor the Byzantinist), it was the perfect setting for tales of murder and intrigue featuring a hero whose anti-institutionalist side mirrored my own.

However, I realized that if I looked to a jester only for his mockery, then he would be a shallow hero indeed. I chose instead to make him part of a larger organization, a guild of jesters and troubadours, whose agenda would be to bring peace to a turbulent world bent on war and oppression in the name of whichever religion was handy. My protagonist would fight in secret, working behind the scenes against the inevitable forces of known history. A quest that only a fool would willingly undertake.

So, Thirteenth Night was born, followed by two books set in Constantinople as the Venetian fleet approached. Each book had its own peculiar demands, and I happily buried myself in bibliographies and footnotes, taking days off from work to plunder the New York Public Library, always feeling that I was an interloper among the true scholars.

It was one such footnote to history that led me to what would become the fourth book in the series, The Widow of Jerusalem . . . but wait. What does any of this have to do with 9/11? What impact could the terrorist attack possibly have on someone who writes entertainments set in the distant past? Mystery fiction is, after all, escapist, and historical mysteries are even more so. They transport us not only out of our own place, but out of our own time, safely isolating us from the terrors and frustrations of the real world. We turn off the televisions and the monitors and turn on the reading lights; we lock our bedroom doors and stack our pillows; we unfurl our beach umbrellas; we run our baths and dissolve into a place of puzzles and solutions.

Yet we are drawn to historical tales in part because we seek parallels to our own lives. For all the strangeness of the past, it is still linked to the present. We look to it for explanation, for confirmation of what we suspect to be the root causes of our present dilemmas, or reassurance that we have progressed and improved over our unenlightened ancestors.

I began writing The Widow of Jerusalem in March, 2001. It was drawn from actual events during and after the Third Crusade. The main story begins in Acre, cheerily enough, with the massacre of over 2,700 Saracen hostages by the Crusaders at the behest of King Richard the Lionhearted—men, women, and children who were not combatants. This immoral act is still mentioned in Moslem lands today as an example of Western perfidy. We in the United States, on the other hand, know Richard, if at all, as the plummy-voiced guy who shows up in the nick of time to bail out Robin Hood.

But as the Crusade headed south, my story went north, to the coastal city of Tyre. And I was immersed in that remarkable place when, as I was walking to the day job, I looked up at the news monitors in my local bank to see the flames from the first tower. By the time I got to my office, the second tower had been hit. By noon, we had shut down and were rushing to schools to pick up our children and bring them home, not knowing what would happen next.

New York City became a small town that week. Everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who died that day. Someone I knew in college and hadn’t seen in twenty years. The wife of a colleague. Everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who miraculously escaped. The husband of an acquaintance took a rare day off. My oldest friend’s sister was uncharacteristically fifteen minutes late and was buying a newspaper in the lobby instead of at her desk. And so we watched the news, with footage from professional cameramen and amateurs, the same event from different angles. We waited over the next few months for the inevitable retaliation. And I continued writing, because that’s what I do, and I had a deadline to meet.

Yet the events crept into my insular world. I was writing a book set in the Middle East, with Christians battling Saracens. My principal setting was Tyre, a city on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway, a crossroads for east and west, where many cultures collided. A city where space was at such a premium that there was no direction to build but up. So, it became a city of towers, much like my own. I found my fool saying, “I constantly had the illusion that the towers were leaning over me, ready to topple.” Characters debated the pointlessness of the Crusades versus the pragmatic advantages of a truce. And a pirate emir in Beirut named Usamah became a menace to Christian pilgrims. It’s a common name in that part of the world.

Historical mysteries at their best will teach without being pedantic. A spoonful of mystery helps the history go down. My presentation of this time and place has its biases so that the story can be told, but that is true of any historian making choices as to what to include. A reader may still learn things he didn’t know before.

Which is vital, because a lack of knowledge can be dangerous. Regardless of what you may think of our current president or his policies, you cannot help but be appalled that early on in his response to the terrorist act, he used the word “crusade” to describe our course of action. That is simply not a word one invokes in the Middle East. Their collective memories go back a lot further than ours do in the United States. We should be much more careful in the way we phrase our objectives.

Am I saying that reading medieval mysteries will make us all better people? Hardly. Didacticism disguised as literature usually just makes for bad writing. But even escapism should be grounded in reality. If a historical fiction writer ignores the political context of the world he or she depicts, then it is merely an exercise in quaint exoticism. But the good authors, and there are many, will take you on a journey, and when you return, you may be a slightly different person than you were when you left. That makes the trip worthwhile. That makes the writing relevant.

Editor’s note. Alan Gordon’s novels of Feste the Jester, published by St. Martin’s Minotaur, include Thirteenth Night (1999), Jester Leaps In (2000), A Death in the Venetian Quarter (2002), The Widow of Jerusalem (2003), and the upcoming An Antic Disposition, scheduled to appear in 2004. He lives and writes in New York. His readers hope that Thirteenth Night, which is out of print, will soon be reprinted.