HISTORICAL WHODUNITS

A probing of some fourteen mysterious deaths in the course of politics and regency in the British realm will serve as a special cooling concoction for the initiate come summer time. These stories of deaths- with conclusions as to causes and their agents- require a good deal of grounding in British history for full reading enjoyment. The author, a proponent of the Great Man myth of historical cause and effect as the most fruitful, presents an astounding cast of doers and done-tos in murders involving policy and personal lives, mostly between 1485 and 1688. The conclusions as to the murder of Amy Robsart, wife of Lord Robert Dudley, whom Cecil kept Elizabeth from marrying; as to Mary Queen of Scots' Innocence in the Kirk o' Field murder of her second husband as against Elizabeth's guilt in the Robsart case; as to the real murderer of the Princes in the Tower -- Henry VII, not Richard III -- suggest the intricacy of the tales, their scholarship and penetration. The stories range from the death of William Rufus in Catharist ritual to the murder of a Campbell on Stewart ground after the '45 battle against England. A rich reworking of the historical vein.