The almshouses which feature in both “Heretical Murder” and “Lowly Death” were founded in 1424 as part of the Charity of Sir Richard Wittington. This is the same “Dick Wittington” of nursery tales and Roald Dahl’s poem “Dick Whittington and His Cat”.

Whatever the reality of the cat and of the bells of London bidding him return, the historical Whittington was indeed “thrice Lord Mayor of London town” and died an extremely wealthy man, leaving provision in his will for the endowing of a library in London and these almshouses connected to a college of priests at St. Michael Paternoster church, all of which was duly done by his executors.  Much disappeared in the next century, courtesy of the Tudors, and the church burned in the Great Fire of the century after that but was rebuilt on the same site and is still there; and although Whittington’s library is gone, his almshouses still exist. Here’s an engraving of them from 1850:

Another from 1827:

And a last from 1880:

In 1966, the charity rebuilt the almshouses, moving from Highgate to East Grinstead. They now provide 56 homes for elderly ladies and a few married couples. Although no longer in the center of London, they still serve their original purpose after almost 600 years.

– Margaret

Over the past few months I’ve gotten many e-mails from Nook owners all asking the same thing: When will your stories be available for the Nook?

And the answer to that is: Right now. We got the Frevisse e-books up a few weeks ago and I’ve just received word that the conversion process has been finished for all of my e-books and they’re now available for sale at the Barnes & Noble website. Going forward, the Nook and Kindle versions will be getting released simultaneously whenever that’s legally possible.

 

(click any cover for its Nook page)

Kobo Owners: I know many of you are also waiting for these titles to be available through the Kobo store. Unfortunately, we have no idea when that will happen. Although you can buy the e-books available from Berkeley, Kobo has not made the other Frevisse e-books available despite the fact that they were submitted weeks and/or months ago. I have no control over this, and I recommend writing directly to Kobo if you want to see any action taken on it. It is within their power to offer the books; they simply haven’t done so.

However, the older Frevisse e-books (the ones that I have control over) are currently available through Smashwords. And if you buy them through Smashwords, you’ll be able to download them in a wide variety of formats, including the ePub format which will allow you to read them on your Kobo. (In fact, the formats available on Smashwords should let you read the books on any e-reader you might own.)

We’ll be converting the rest of the novelettes and short stories to Smashwords in the near future, and I’ll post an update here when that happens.

My tech person also tells me that we do not use DRM at any of our digital outlets, which means that it should be relatively easy to convert file formats. (Although, honestly, I’d be lost if you asked me to do it.)

– Margaret

“Lowly Death” has been released for the Kindle and Nook. It can also be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms.

A CUNNING AND CLEVER GREED…

Come down the Paternoster Passage, cross the church’s yard, and knock on the doors of Master Whittington’s Almshouse. Master Pecock, a man of the cloth and the greatest detective of 15th century London, will answer your call.

Just as he answers Dick Colop’s call. The mother of young Colop’s friend has slipped, fallen, and died. But something doesn’t feel right about it. There’s a strange uneasiness creeping at the back of Colop’s mind.

And then there was the matter of the candle.

It was in the kitchen. A burned down stub of a candle. It had rolled under a table. And left a thick splattering of wax on the floor a foot or so away.

That was enough. Master Pecock was on the scent. The scent of lies. The scent of wrongs. The scent of murder.

Kindle Edition – Nook Edition

“Lowly Death” is the third tale of Bishop Pecock, coming after “Heretical Murder” and after “The Simple Logic of It”. It was first published in Murder Most Catholic, edited by Ralph McInerny. Master Pecock has advanced in his priestly career and is now head of the well-endowed Whittington Almshouses in London.  Rather than the tendrils of national crime, here he deals with a domestic matter.

The plot came – as so many of my plots do – from an actual medieval situation.  I will often be innocently reading some scholarly study or else the documents themselves, when something catches at the criminally-inclined corner of my mind and I suddenly ask, “Yes, but what if…” and away I’ll be, the twisty mind of a mystery writer turning what – in the document – was a perfectly straightforward business matter into a full-blooded (and usually bloody) convolution of human relationships and situations. And when I look back from the finished story to the innocent document that started at all, I’ll often be surprised at how far the transmutation of imagination has taken the original few facts.

One small but continually niggling thing stays with me from this story: The editor’s note at the beginning of the anthology.  There Mr. McInerny stated that, although the story “uses medieval setting for color, it remains a thoroughly modern deductive mystery”. In fact, the methods of deduction used in the story are perfectly medieval, drawn directly from the methods of deduction outlined by Master Pecock himself in his own works of circa 1450, wherein he urged people to seek truth through the use of reason and demonstrated how to do it, very much in the way he uses logic and reason in this story.

– Margaret