The Desperate Remedy by
Martin Stephen
hbk out October 02
Published by Little Brown
at £16.99
Sub-titled 'Henry Gresham and the Gunpowder Plot', this is a first novel by
an author already well-established with fifteen books on literature and
military history. Martin Stephen's new venture into historical fiction bodes
well for the future, with his introduction of Sir Henry Gresham as his hero.
Gresham is a rich nobleman who was a spy for Walsingham in the later
Elizabethan period and is now left in a precarious position under Robert
Cecil, the evil First Secretary to the new king, James of Scotland.
Gresham is the good guy in a London swarming with intrigue, where every
second person seems to be an agent, double agent or even triple agent for
one side or the other, in the fragile balance between Protestants and
Catholics. He lives with his faithful retainer, Mannion and his beautiful
young mistress Jane, who he saved as a child from a life of abuse and who
now runs his great house on the Strand. Gresham becomes aware of a plot to
assassinate the King and many of the Lords and sets in motion his
machinations to frustrate it. A reviewer has the usual problems of not being
able to say much more, for fear of blowing the plot, but this is a heady tale
of corruption, zealotry and violence. How closely it is compatible with the
known facts of the Popish Plot, I'm not qualified to judge, but as the author
is a professional historian - and High Master of Manchester Grammar
School - I suspect that his plot meshes fairly well with the historical account.
The writing is immaculate and very strong indeed - nothing is spared in
describing the cruelty and squalor of Shakespeare's England. Another book
in the Gresham saga is to be published next autumn and I feel sure that this will
become an established series, Henry Gresham doing for the early
seventeenth century what Brother Cadfael and Crowner John did for the
twelfth!
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
