Customer Reviews

The Roaring Boy (An Elizabethan Mystery)

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Edward Marston is the pseudonym of Keith Miles, a fairly prolific and extremely good writer of mainly Elizabethan and medieval mysteries. He has also written mysteries under his own name with both sporting and golf backgrounds. However it is primarily the books that take place earlier in history that I am interested in. He read modern history at Oxford and has had many jobs, including university lecturer, but fortunately for all his readers, he turned to the writing profession.

Another winner from the series of Elizabethan Theatre books starring Nicholas Bracewell, company manager of Lord Westfield's Men, a group of actors who seem to take more looking after than a group of young children.

The skills of Nicholas as a detective are needed when a new play being put on by the players and based on a savage murder becomes all too real.

Edward Marston bring to life the sights and sound of Elizabethan London so effectively that the reader almost feels transported back to the narrow stinking streets of old London town.

A revisionist version of a real-life murder, made famous by a fine Elizabethan drama (Anon., Arden of Feversham). The murder of Mr. Arden was a crime for which the wife of Arden and her lover paid a terrible price. In those times a wife's murder of her husbad was declared to be "treason", and Alice Arden and one of her maids were accordingly burned at the stake, while her male accomplices (one was completely innocent) were sentenced to hang in chains until they died. Marston's derivative novel portrays these events in an interesting manner and finds a solution that is plausible and sympathetic to other victims of this tragedy.

This book is an engrossing take on its sources, on the economic disaster caused by the dissolution of monasteries during the Protestant takeover, and on the position of women at that time, when even the high-born Alice Arden became the chattel of her social-climbing husband.

But more importantly, it is a novel of such ingenuity that it creates a fresh puzzle to be solved with igenuity and considerable insight into the source material.

"The Roaring Boy" was the first book I read from Edward Marston. The marriage of Elizabethan theater and murder were very surpising and enjoyable.
The main character of Marston's books, Nicholas Bracewell, was a fresh change to other characters I have read in many books.

"The Roaring Boy" was about two innocent people who were murdered and how Nicholas went searching for who killed them. The other characters such as: Lawrence Firethorn, Edmund Hoode and Barnaby Gill added life to the book. I enjoyed the camaderie that each other had for the others around them. "The Roaring Boy" was very intruging and exciting to read.