By Paul Carrier
Eric Jager has a heck of a tale to tell, one filled with madness, intrigue, conspiracies, cuckolded husbands, rumors of sorcery, even talk of a poisoned apple. Most telling of all, it is the story of a brutal medieval murder that destabilized a nation.
The setting: 15th-century Paris during a lull in the Hundred Years' War. The victim: Louis of Orléans, brother of the French king. The hero: the provost of Paris who, as the city's chief law-enforcement officer, must determine who butchered the Duke of Orléans on a public street in the dead of night and why, as fear spreads that King Charles himself may be in jeopardy.
Jager's gripping story packs a cinematic punch that practically leaves the reader gasping for breath as the murder and its immediate aftermath unfold. Much of Blood Royal reads like a thriller, but here's the best part: this is not fiction.
The 1407 murder that Provost Guillaume de Tignonville sets out to solve was all-too-real. Jager's voluminous footnotes document every quote, twist and turn. The fact that Blood Royal is so amazingly detailed, thanks to Jager's exhaustive research, is all the more remarkable when you consider that the crime at the heart of it all occurred more than 600 years ago. It's one thing for a talented novelist to make historical fiction compelling, but it's quite another for a writer to rely on ancient sources to make a work of history riveting, and to keep it moving with the narrative thrust of a novel.
Louis' murder was especially problematic for France because he was regent for his brother, King Charles VI, who had been "intermittently insane" for years. Capable but hot-headed and self-centered, Louis knew how to make enemies. He imposed excessive taxes; exercised royal powers; routinely bedded married women, possibly including Queen Isabeau; nearly killed his brother the king, albeit by accident; and was perpetually at odds with his powerful cousin, the Duke of Burgundy.
By contrast, Tignonville, the provost of Paris, is an iconic good guy straight out of central casting: honest, fair, conscientious and highly literate (he was a poet and translator), yet tough and seasoned in the devious, byzantine ways of French politics and diplomacy.
When we first meet him at the start of Blood Royal, Tignonville appears to be all-powerful in matters of the law. Hundreds of sergeants are under his command. He has a dozen bodyguards known as The Twelve. He can legally arrest, interrogate, even torture, witnesses and suspects. And he supervises executions.
But Tignonville is put to the test when he suspects that the man behind the murder is John, Duke of Burgundy, Louis' cousin and a member of the royal council that ordered Tignonville to investigate the crime. If he tries to arrest, or even question, the Duke of Burgundy, who is part of the king's inner circle and may well be the most powerful man in France now that the Duke of Orléans is dead, Tignonville may place himself, as well as his wife and daughter, in danger.
Summoned by the royal council to report on his findings, Tignonville devises an ingenious strategy, which I won't reveal here. Suffice it to say Tignonville solves the crime without paying the ultimate price, but events spiral out of control after that, in a dizzying display of bravado, scheming, foolishness, cowardice, double-dealing and ambition.
Jager carefully explains it all, as France is engulfed by civil war and invasion. In the process, he provides a wealth of background information about everyday life in 15th-century Paris, as well as tantalizing details and anecdotes about the personalities, proclivities and peccadilloes of key players in his saga. We learn, for example, that France was plagued by all manner of superstition in the early 1400s, including the belief that mental illness was attributable to sorcery.
But more than anything else, Jager clearly wants readers to appreciate that Tignonville was both a man of integrity in an age of deceit and a police officer whose professionalism was far ahead of its time. In an article he wrote for France Today, a journal of French culture, Jager notes that Tignonville's lengthy report on his investigation "does not so much as hint that he or any of his officers used torture or forced confessions to solve the case, despite the crime's magnitude and the urgency of the situation." Instead, the provost "diligently collected evidence, deposed witnesses, and deduced the truth from the information thus obtained."
Tignonville's "sober, methodical inquiry into the shocking 1407 murder should assure this brave, incorruptible knight's place in history as a pioneering detective."
