Customer Reviews

Historical Mysteries

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Andrew Lang, better known for a rainbow of fairy tales, has gotten out and dusted off some of the most puzzling of historical European mysteries. The book, written apparently in 1904, sparkles with wit and bristles with historical research. An unexpected winner.

Best known for his [Color] Fairy Books, Andrew Lang was also a poet, historian, and scholar. This is a book of his history -- more specifically, it's a book of educated speculation on the truth behind various historical oddities, primarily oddities of Scottish and French history. Most of the mysteries involve assassinations, royalty, or nobility, but a few involve the common folk as well. The second to last chapter, "The Mystery of the Kirks", explains what the actual differences are between various scottish presbyterian sects. The chapter "The Case of Allan Breck" concerns the "Appin Murder", and may be of interest to fans of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel _Kidnapped._

A number of these (Saint-Germain, for example, or the Appin Murder) have been the subject of much writing since Lang's time and more developed studies exist elsewhere; others, however, like the Case of Elizabeth Canning or the Gowrie Plot, are fairly esoteric historical trivia, and may be of some real interest to the student of odd history.

The table of contents is as follows:

The Case of Elizabeth Canning
The Murder of Escovedo
The Campden Mystery
The Case of Allan Breck
The Cardinal's Necklace
The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, the Child of Europe
The Gowrie Conspiracy
The Strange Case of Daniel Douglas Home
The Case of Captain Green
Queen Oglethorpe
The Chevalier D'Eon
Saint-Germain the Deathless
The Mystery of the Kirks
The End of Jean de la Motte

The stories are written in the charming style familiar to me from stories by my great-aunts' youth. The pacing isn't always as fast as we're now used to, but it's fun to read if you're into history.

My one gripe is that the scan clean-up is inconsistent. Most parts are perfect, but there are sections where it's distractingly littered with random consonants, mainly an accented "r", and run-on words. There have been a few places where I'm unsure if the entire sentence is there. Apparently one of the volunteers wasn't as good at this as the others.