New York Mysteries 5 [EXCLUSIVE] Download
Analisa Wisdom
The Duke of York Mysteries takes inspiration from classic British cosy crime TV like Midsomer Murders, Jonathan Creek, and the numerous adaptations of Dame Agatha Christie's works. The series will follow the detecting adventures of Sebastian Duke, an English gentleman who solves mysteries around the city.
The term "saints" in the title, as indicated in a comment on the dust jacket, actually derives from the expression "saints and sinners," which points to rather different criteria for selection. The colourful tyrants, rogues and villains of medieval drama (the ranting Herods of the mysteries, Noah's Wife, Mak the sheepstealer or the entertaining vices of Mankind) having been accorded more than their fair share of critical attention, this study is prompted by the very reasonable belief that it is more than time the good guys (and girls) were subjected to equally sustained and informed attention. It cannot have been an attractive task: the more familiar analogous "saints" of later cultural traditions--from Richmond in Richard III to the Prince in Snow White--are pale shadows in relation to their wicked antagonists. And from the perspective of modern sensibilities and perspectives their medieval dramatic antecedents (the pompous and long-winded Mercy; the pious Abel) seem analogously dull and earnest in their goodness. It undoubtedly helps that the four figures chosen here (in a manner which the book might have heralded more elaborately), "flawed human beings who nonetheless achieved sainthood" (8) share a liminal quality which undoubtedly made them more interesting but which actually places them in the interstices between the saint and the sinner. ("Flawed Saints" or "Sinful Saints" or "Saintly Sinners" might have been a better title.)