Historical mysteries redux

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt recently shipped me a copy of Maxim Jakubowski's festschrift of sorts for the late Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters, Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historic Crime (iBooks, 1998).  As it happens, he thought I wouldn't be especially interested by the fiction (an accurate prediction, as it turned out--with one or two exceptions, the stories are regrettably unmemorable), but rather by the brief author's notes prefacing each story. 

From a literary critic's perspective, what's striking about the notes is the extent to which they discuss reading historical fiction instead of writing historical fiction.  The authors praise those writers (Peters included) who have "this marvellous ability of transporting you back in time" (1) or "the gift of taking readers into a world as recognisable as the one in which they lived" (49); who make us see that "despite the passage of seven hundred years, deep down we're not that different from the people of twelfth-century Shrewsbury, or any other place and time" (139); who "sho[w] us the distant past as urgently and compassionately as the present" (313); who offer readers the opportunity to "[lose] themselves for a while in a different place and time" (329).  The explicit or implicit narrative "magic" (the novel as TARDIS?) involved suggests that the writers have a very specific form of the historical novel in mind: the classical realist novel, in the vein of Sir Walter Scott.   Readers travel into an imaginary space that is immensely different yet somehow immediately "recognizable," occupied by people whose cultural referents are distant from our own but still "not that different," and so forth.  The novel itself as a novel is nowhere to be seen; we are not to think about how the novelist constructs her narrative, dynamically engages with her sources, or modifies the genre itself. 

Thus, while Dan Green argues today that "if it [a novel] is ultimately to be regarded as a work of literary art, it ought to provoke us into reflection on its own aesthetic designs, precisely on its identity as a construction made out of language,"  most of the anthology's contributors suggest quite the opposite: the historical novelist ought to cloak the "art" involved in creating the illusion of immediacy.  The sharpest dissenting note in this anthology comes from Julian Rathbone, who bluntly declares that "[a]ll historical fiction, including mystery stories, invariably betrays and portrays the time it was written as much as or more than it accurately presents the time in which it is set.  This is a) inevitable and b) generally not openly acknowledged" (111).  Moreover, Rathbone goes on to argue, "let us not imagine that the experience has opened up to us an understanding of the real Jane Austen or the real nineteenth century" (111-12).  (Not surprisingly, Rathbone contributes the anthology's only overtly metafictional story.)  It's worth noting that Rathbone not only undercuts the historical novel's claim to immediacy, but also to its claim to educational value; Peter Tremayne, who tells us elsewhere in the volume that he began writing his Sister Fidelma stories after a student suggested historical mysteries would be a "painless and enjoyable way of instruction" (286), might be feeling a little unease at this juncture.  In Rathbone's formulation, the historical novel is not a TARDIS but a mirror--which, incidentally, doesn't necessarily imply that the self-reflexivity involved has to do with the artist's craft. 

What's interesting, or perhaps odd, about these author's notes is that the mystery has traditionally been a metafictional genre.  Mysteries, after all, involve heavy dollops of plotting and critical interpretation--even before we get to characters complaining about how they're being represented (Sherlock Holmes), pointing out that they're in detective novels (Dr. Gideon Fell), or trying to emulate "traditional" private investigators (Joe Sixsmith).   Rathbone might note how historical mysteries tend to feature detectives who think like Sherlock Holmes, even when they're in medieval Scotland, ancient Egypt, or seventeenth-century America; the detectives always default to rationalist positions--no divine intervention, no demon possession, no witches...--whether or not it's culturally appropriate.