Ben Jonson, homicide detective
Jul. 18th, 2024 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFrom the “This has been sitting on my shelf for entirely too long” files, I picked up Greer Gilman’s Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, a chapbook from Small Beer Press that, according to the inscription on the title page, I bought at Readercon 2014. Whoops.
This is a weird little murder mystery for very serious Elizabethan theater nerds. I am not a very serious Elizabeth theater nerd, but I know enough about the period to be interested in it, and can at least sort-of follow most Shakespeare-adjacent historical fiction.
This one I can definitely only sort-of follow. Gilman writes the whole piece in allusion-laden Elizabeth English, and the effect is marvelously immersive. I spotted not one but two uses of my new favorite word “hirpling,” if that gives you a sense how little Gilman is bothered about Being Accessible To A Wider Audience. But the work of prying open this closely sealed pistachio of a tale is rewarding, because, if I have read it rightly, the story being told here is a Gothic magnificence, in which a corrupt serial killer aristocrat makes young theater boys participate in bizarre rituals of bad theater and then kills them, and famous playwright and poet Ben Jonson has to travel to Venice to meet up with a shady character in a church and acquire poison, which he then brings back to England so that he can team up with one of the theater boys and exact revenge upon the villainous Lord for his twin crimes of serial killing and writing very bad plays. It’s really quite a lot of fun, and there’s times when you can really hear and see and smell the crowded nastiness of early modern cities in a really vibrant, textured way. I could probably stand to read it a second time and look up more words, but it is more likely that I will try to see if any of Gilman’s other work is a little easier to read.
This is a weird little murder mystery for very serious Elizabethan theater nerds. I am not a very serious Elizabeth theater nerd, but I know enough about the period to be interested in it, and can at least sort-of follow most Shakespeare-adjacent historical fiction.
This one I can definitely only sort-of follow. Gilman writes the whole piece in allusion-laden Elizabeth English, and the effect is marvelously immersive. I spotted not one but two uses of my new favorite word “hirpling,” if that gives you a sense how little Gilman is bothered about Being Accessible To A Wider Audience. But the work of prying open this closely sealed pistachio of a tale is rewarding, because, if I have read it rightly, the story being told here is a Gothic magnificence, in which a corrupt serial killer aristocrat makes young theater boys participate in bizarre rituals of bad theater and then kills them, and famous playwright and poet Ben Jonson has to travel to Venice to meet up with a shady character in a church and acquire poison, which he then brings back to England so that he can team up with one of the theater boys and exact revenge upon the villainous Lord for his twin crimes of serial killing and writing very bad plays. It’s really quite a lot of fun, and there’s times when you can really hear and see and smell the crowded nastiness of early modern cities in a really vibrant, textured way. I could probably stand to read it a second time and look up more words, but it is more likely that I will try to see if any of Gilman’s other work is a little easier to read.