(There are so many medieval mysteries we’ve devoted a separate sheet to them

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British Historical Mysteries
(There are so many medieval mysteries we've devoted a separate page to them.)

October 2001 Roman Britain

Rosemary Rowe's series set in Roman Britain features freedman and pavement-maker Libertus. The Germanicus Mosaic is the first.
Jack Whyte’s Eagle’s Brood saga begins in Roman Britain and goes through Arthurian times.

Elizabethan

Fiona Buckley writes about widowed Ursula Blanchard, who becomes one of Elizabeth ‘s ladies-in-waiting. Kirkus Reviews praises the "vivid characters, religious conflict, subplots, and power plays." In the first, To Shield the Queen, she is sent to stay with Amy (Robsart) Dudley.
Judith Cook features Dr. Simon Forman, an Elizabethan doctor, horoscope caster, and solver of mysteries. Beginning with Death of a Lady's Maid, these are intelligent, well-balanced, and entertaining.
Kathy Emerson’s Face Down in the Marrow Bone Pie is the start of a popular series featuring the educated herbalist wife of one of Elizabeth’s ambassadors.
Patricia Finney has two mysteries under her own name, Firedrake’s Eye and Unicorn’s Blood. As P. F. Chisholm, she writes about Sir Hugh Carey, cousin to Elizabeth, attempting to maintain order on the borderlands of England and Scotland. Famine of Horses was the first in this fine series.
Philip Gooden's Sleep of Death introduces Nick Revill, an aspiring actor seeking fame and fortune who stumbles into employment with the Chamberlain's Men. A lively and authentic picture of an Elizabethan player's life. One reader recommends reading it at least twice--once for the story and once for the excellent background detail.
Karen Harper started a swashbuckling new series with The Poyson Garden. This one features Elizabeth herself as the detective.
Edward Marston made his mark with his Nicholas Bracewell series about a troop of Elizabethan players.
Anthony Burgess’s Dead Man in Deptford, considered one of the best historical mysteries, deals with Christopher Marlowe’s murder, while Reckoning, Charles Nicholls’s non-fiction study of the same event, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography and the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for a nonfiction thriller.
Shakespearean Whodunnits is a collection of stories by well-known contemporary writers, the crimes solved by Shakespearean characters as diverse as Puck and Mistress Quickly.

Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Janet Laurence blends fact with fiction in her highly readable series with Canaletto as the detective. Canaletto and the Case of the Westminster Bridge was the first.
Two series center upon Sir John Fielding, the blind justice of London: British author Deryn Lake writes an atmospheric Georgian series woven around young apothecary John Rawlings, who works as an investigator for Fielding. In Bruce Alexander’s books, Fielding’s young ward Jeremy Proctor narrates Fielding’s investigations. (Murder in Grub Street, the second of this series, was a New York Times Notable Book.)
Robert Lee Hall's books are also set in London, and Justice Fielding appears as a secondary character, but the detective is Benjamin Franklin and the narrator Franklin’s illegitimate son.
Man's Storm begins Keith Heller's unusual trio of crime novels following the career of a parish watchman, beginning in 1703 London.
Hannah March's The Complaint of the Dove introduces the complex and intuitive Robert Fairfax, private tutor and amateur sleuth in the 1760s, the vibrant age of Tom Jones and Moll Flanders.
Fidelis Morgan features Countess Ashby de la Zouche, former mistress to Charles II, in a finny and evocative series beginning with Unnatural Fire.

Nineteenth Century

Stephanie Barron puts Jane Austen to work as detective, beginning with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. The series effectively captures Austen’s style as a vehicle for the traditional mystery.
Emily Brightwell’s Mrs. Jeffries, housekeeper for Inspector Witherspoon, is the one who actually solves the crimes in this cozy Victorian series.
Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger, is a stirring Dickensian thriller set in a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831. A young woman who sells herself to support and protect her baby finds a ray of hope after meeting a physician tormented by his own dark past. A brilliant portrayal of nineteenth-century urban life and heartrendingly real characters.
Robert Goddard’s Painting the Darkness is set in the l880s London art world.
They Hanged my Saintly Billy, by Robert Graves, is based on the actual trial of accused poisoner William Palmer in Victorian England.
Jane Jakeman's post-Regency mysteries combine Lord Byron and Mr. Rochester in the sleuth Lord Ambrose Malfine. These are charming and well executed. The Egyptian Coffin is the first.
Alanna Knight confures up the atmosphere of nineteenth century Edinburgh in her series featuring Inspector Jeremy Faro.
In Laura Blundy, Julie Myerson weaves together the elements of a thriller, a love story, and a ghost tale in the story of a Victorian woman whose obsession with a lover drives her to kill her husband.
Charles Palliser's Unburied presents a Victorian scholar confronted with a macabre tale of murder and deception dating back two centuries. Perfectly captures the feel of the Victorian age.
William Palmer brings Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins together in his Mr. Dickens and . . . series.
Both of Anne Perry’s series—the William Monk and the Thomas/Charlotte Pitt—offer somber explorations of the dark side of the Victorian era.
Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody takes a humorous look at the same period, though the archeologist-heroine does most of her sleuthing in Egypt.
Kate Ross’s books feature the mysterious dandy Julian Kestrel and are set in the Regency period. Cut to the Quick is the first.
As a stand alone, Martin Cruz Smith’s Rose brilliantly recreates in the Victorian coal-mining town of Wigan, comparing and contrasting it with colonial Africa.
Rosemary Stevens features Beau Brummell as detective. Death on a Silver Platter was the first.
Robin Paige presents abundant period detail and the investigations of Sir Charles Sheridan and his American wife Kate (who writes penny dreadfuls under the name of Beryl Bardwell).
Kate Kingsbury’s cozy Edwardian series centers upon the happenings at the Pennyfoot Hotel.

Twentieth Century

Tim Binding's atmospheric suspense novel Lying with the Enemy is set on the German-occupied island of Guernsey in 1943.
Carola Dunn transports us back to 1920s Britain, where flapper and would-be journalist Daisy Dalrymple solves mysteries in the classic cozy style. Death at Wentwater Court was the first.
Robert Goddard’s In Pale Battalions is set during the Great War
With A Bicycle Built for Two, Kate Kingsbury started a new series set in the quiet village of Sitting Marsh during WWII.
Charles Todd’s A Test of Wills and the sequels deal with a shell-shocked World War I veteran recovering in England.

Researchers into the Past

Thomas Ackroyd’s Booker-nominated Chatterton puts twentieth-century sleuths on the trail of evidence that the forger-poet’s death was a fraud.
In The Wench Is Dead, a hospitalized Inspector Morse becomes convinced of the innocence of two men hanged for murder in 1859. This won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year in l989.
In Josephine Tey’s wonderful The Daughter of Time, Inspector Alan Grant investigates Richard III and the murder of the princes in the Tower—all while lying in a hospital bed. Royal Blood--1999 Ricardian Book of the Year from the Ricardian Register--is a meticulously researched analysis of the evidence by prominent lawyer Bertram Fields.

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