INTERVIEW WITH MARGARET FRAZER

     I have a special Christmas gift for my readers, an interview with Margaret Frazer, author of two outstanding medieval mystery series set in 15th century England.  The Sister Frevisse mysteries feature a remarkable protagonist, a nun who is not at all saintly.  She does not suffer fools gladly, but she struggles constantly to subdue her pride, to adhere to the strict rules of her Order even as the tranquility of their nunnery is disrupted by the unwelcome intrusions of the real world—mayhem and murder.  Margaret's second series showcases the talents of Joliffe, dashing player in a traveling troupe of actors and sometime spy for the powerful and dangerous Bishop of Winchester, one of the crafty Beaufort clan.  Joliffe appeared occasionally in Sister Frevisse's books and readers found him so appealing that they urged Margaret to give Joliffe his own series.  Joliffe is a wonderful creation—clever, observant, and resourceful, with an ironic eye and a laid-back charm that I, for one, find quite irresistible.  

      In the interest of full disclosure, Margaret and I have been good friends for a number of years—as you'll be able to tell by the tone of our exchanges.  But I was her fan before I became her friend.  She is serious about her craft, serious about her research, even more serious than me, and we all know I'm obsessive-compulsive!  The result is a form of literary time-travel. Readers never doubt for a moment that her characters are men and women of 15th century England.  And because she is realistic in her approach to her plots (a.k.a ruthless), the suspense level is ratcheted up to alarming levels.  We never know if she is going to kill off a character we really like, (And yes, Margaret, I am still holding a grudge for The Servant's Tale.) or reveal that character to be the killer.  Her newest book is A Play of Piety.  I was delighted when I learned it was coming out in December, seeing it as my reward for finishing Lionheart.  And now, let the interview begin. 

A PLAY OF PIETY is the sixth book in your medieval mystery series featuring Joliffe the Player, a traveling actor in England in the 1400s, but you also have seventeen other medieval mysteries centered on Dame Frevisse, a Benedictine nun, set in the same time period.  Do you ever get asked, "Don't you get tired of writing the same book over and over again?"

 

I've indeed been asked that, more than once.  I suppose it's a reasonable question, given all twenty-three books are mysteries and set in the same time period and general place and, yes, I suppose I would get bored writing the same book over and over again.  So I don't write the same book over and over again. (Subtext: Do I look like a fool?)  With Frevisse, every story is told from two viewpoints: hers and that of the title character.  Since those title characters are drawn from all aspects of medieval English society – for instance from a reeve running a small village to an independent businesswoman in London to the bastard son of a royal duke – I get to look at medieval life from wide variety of viewpoints and levels.  I can't get bored if I have to move into the minds of people as far apart as a crowner's very humble clerk and a high-born bishop, an outlaw and a well-off widow of the gentry.  And for me, moving into the minds of people not me is what it's all about.

The same goes for Joliffe's books.  They're only told from his viewpoint, which is extremely low in society and that of an outsider for good measure.  But he's a man with a craft he enjoys – acting – and because his company of players travel and perform in a wide variety of places, he encounters all sorts of different societal situations.  And of course for him I've upped the ante as the series goes on by him taking service as a spy for someone powerful in the government, which serves to take him to France and into a high noble's household in A PLAY OF TREACHERY at a very dangerous time in the Hundred Years War.  In A PLAY OF PIETY, by wide contrast, he's working in a medieval hospital among very ordinary people.  For me, recreating such complex but widely divergent settings and the people to inhabit them is a sure way never to never be "writing the same book over and over again".  It's people who write the same clichés over and over again who risk getting bored.

 

From things I've heard you say other times, I know you have really deep seated issues with clichés in books about the Middle Ages.

 

Oh, yes.  I can get very verbal, shall we say, about the clichés used by writers.  So much of what we're taught to think of as "medieval" – such as streets deep in filth and garbage hurled out of windows and nobody bathing (apparently from the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance)—actually date from Tudor times and later.  And then there are the old standbys of "medieval" life: plague every time you turn around; lawless (and usually lascivious) lords by the bushel-basket full; violence so endemic it's a wonder anyone dared go out of doors; and women dying in childbirth.  Please – no more books wallowing in the Black Death!  Find a different theme, for pity's sake! The Black Death has been done (dare I say it) to death.  I won't even try to refute the notion that all through the late medieval England, year in and year out, violent lords and outlaw bands were romping at will up and down and around the countryside.  Violence happened and there are idiots in every society (for which mystery writers are thankful, of course), and the Wars of the Roses did make for outbreaks of ugliness in the latter half of the 1400s, but I deliberately have my two series set in some decades when English life was going along very nicely, thank you, in order to contrast the shock of a crime against the reasonable tenor of most people's everyday lives.  A bit more challenging than going for the down and dirty and obvious, but I like the challenge

              The trouble is that so many novelists read general study books of "medieval life" and a simplistic biography or two and let it go at that. Additionally, even if they've read a little deeper, they still transpose their own sensibilities into the story and present a distorted view of the times and people.  This is the "Mary Jane Visits the Castle" syndrome.  Or "Cathy Meets the Cathars".  Or "Brian Braves the Bad Baron".  There are plenty of chronicles, government documents,literature, and letters (besides those of the obnoxious, overly ubiquitous Pastons) of the time available in print and online, and modern scholarly articles likewise that could help writers move into the medieval mindset, rather than turn their novels into fantasy costume pieces erroneously called "medieval".

             As for the grotesqueries and stupidities perpetrated in movies – don't get me started.

 

Hm.  Yes.  Don't hold back.  Tell us how you really feel.  Cliches in books set in medieval times really bother you, then?

 

Really.  Of course an author is free to tell whatever story they want to tell, and that's fine.  We all have every right to do that, and if an author and some readers are content with clichés, that's fine for them.  If I don't like a book, I don't have to read it.  But I do object to books that claim to be set in medieval times that then make a farce of that claim by doing the most egregiously wrong things.  We all make mistakes, but some things are SO wrong as to reduce the book from historical fiction to what I call "medieval fantasy fiction".  Worse, personally speaking, is that then a book that strives for greater accuracy of time and place is seen as "wrong" because it doesn't match the clichés.  Ask me about the editor of a short story collection in which I had a story, who said in his introductory essay that of course my supposedly medieval detective was actually very modern.

 

All right.  What about the editor of short story collection who said in his introductory essay that your supposedly medieval detective was very modern?

 

I'm so glad you brought that up.  The detective in question is Reynold Pecock.  He's an actual historical personage.  The short story was set at a time when he was master of a college of priests and an almshouse in London .  He later became a bishop, and appears in THE BASTARD'S TALE and my short stories "The Simple Logic of It" (presently available electronically from Amazon.com; this is an unpaid advertisement thereunto), "Heretical Murder" and "Lowly Death" (not yet available online).  As an actual churchman of the 1400s, Pecock had the idea that the best way to bring heretics back into the Church was to persuade them by reason to give up their heresy, and to that end he wrote a number of books in, gasp, English, laying out in step-by-step logic why heretics should change their minds.  Some of these books are extent and in print.  If you have an urge to read medieval theology in Middle English, you can.  I did (which explains a lot about me, including why I have so little social life: " Hi. Want to discuss the theological and political ramifications in Bishop Pecock's BOOK OF FAITH?"), and I found him a delightful,kindly, occasionally droll man, with a mind devoted to intense logic and perfectly suited to be a detective.  The methods he uses in the stories to untangle crimes is absolutely medieval.  But the editor did not think so, and so in the anthology where that particular story appears, my detective is labeled as anachronistic when he very much is not.       

            Along that same line is a reviewer of THE SQUIRE'S TALE who observed that it seemed the only way a woman could avoid dying in childbirth in the Middle Ages was to never get married.  This was a singularly gratuitous observation because, although there was a pregnant woman in the book, she did not die in childbirth.  But the cliché is so strong that readers apparently see it even when it isn't there!

 

On another tack altogether, some of us find Joliffe a very attractive man.  Why doesn't he have more romantic encounters in his books?

 

You mean what doesn't he get more sex?

 

Yes.

 

How about: The publishers impose a contractual word-limit on each book, and I have to use so many words creating the time and place believably, there aren't enough left for sexual encounters, too.

            - or -

Mostly the plots just haven't had room for plays, politics, murders, detection, and sex, without bending the stories illogically out of shape, just to get Joliffe into bed with someone. 

            - or -

I'm selfish and keeping him for myself.

            - or -

He's actually getting far more action than it appears, but it all happens between the novels.

 

I've suspected as much.  Tell us more about him.

 

You remember that Joliffe first appeared in the Frevisse series, back in THE SERVANT'S TALE, and later shows up in THE PRIORESS' TALE and THE BASTARD'S TALE and then as the title character in THE TRAITOR'S TALE.  His first appearance was supposed to be a one-off but I like him so well that I brought him back in that second and third time but couldn't interest my agent in trying to sell him in a series of his own.  "The Frevisse series is going well.  Don't shoot yourself in the foot," was the way I remember she put it.  So I wrote A PLAY OF ISAAC just to show I could do two series at once.  It sold and Joliffe was on his way.

 Now if you remember his last exchange with Frevisse at the end of TRAITOR'S, you know somewhere along the way true love comes into his life.  Exactly when and how and with whom – I'm not telling.

 

But that must mean that you know, doesn't it?  That you have an idea of where the series is going in a long arc, rather than just winging it from book to book.

 

Yes.  And that's all you're getting out of me.  But you may be amused to know that, with Frevisse's series, someone lately got their master's degree in English with the thesis that the novels are effectively separate chapters of a single long, multi-volume novel, based on the fact that the main character grows and changes over the course of the series into a deeper and more complex being than at its beginning.  If you'd like to read it, the whole thesis can be accessed from my website (if the link is working properly; let me know if it's misbehaving again).

 

But the books can be read individually, as stand-alones, too, can't they?

 

Certainly.  I intended them that way and give away as little as possible about past books in later books.  Of course if someone is alive in Book 15, you can suppose they aren't murdered in an earlier book, but aside from that, they can be read separately and out of order.  One of the best compliments I've had comes from people who've told me they read the series out of order and enjoyed it so much they went back and read it in order.  That Frevisse, like Joliffe, grows and changes as the series goes on is part of my not-being-bored with writing these books.   

 

Yet you've said you have no plans for more novels about Frevisse.

 

When I realized my publisher was letting my backlist die, indicating they were losing interest in the series, I decided to bring the story to the end I wanted, rather than leave it to the publisher to chop it at some random point.  That said, I'm working on a brand-new Frevisse short story to put up for e-sale on Amazon.com fairly soon.  And work is afoot to make some of the long out-of-print books available there for Kindle, hopefully one at least before this year is out.  THE BISHOP'S TALE, as things stand now.

 

That's good news, anyway.  What about Joliffe?

 

I'm just finishing A PLAY OF HERESY.  That's the second book on my current two-book contract.  What the publisher decides then is up to the publisher and whatever arcane formulas the bean-counters come up with to determine life or death for midlist authors.  I will be the last to know.  Given how well e-books seem to be selling – and the fact that I have a son who understands how to turn books and stories into e-versions – that may be where I end up, writing and marketing my own work exclusively online. 

            Hey!  Maybe, with no limit on word-count, Joliffe could end up having more romantic encounters!

 

     That would work well for me.  As you know from my constant nagging, I'm very much in favor of Joliffe's having more "romantic encounters."   Thank you, Margaret, for stopping by.  On your next visit, maybe you can tell us about your intention to put aside your medieval mysteries temporarily to write a novel about Elizabeth of York.   

 

December 18, 2010