Sometimes when I am reading a book (especially when I know I am going to have to write some kind of review of it later!) I stop halfway through and ask myself what I particularly like about it, something - anything - of which it is a particularly good example. Thus it was with The Leper's Return: I found myself realising suddenly that it was a classical detective story. I had read other books by Michael Jecks without noticing (and more than half of this one) but like the solution to a simple problem, once you see it, you don't understand how you could ever have missed it.
There is the inspired, eccentric detective, Sir Baldwin Furnshill, with the requisite "romantic" background (he is an ex-Templar who survived the holocaust and bears all the scars of that experience, including a profound distrust of authority in any form, Church or State, and a sympathy with anyone wrongly accused or unjustly treated). There is "the Watson", Simon Puttock. There is a murder. There is a closed circle of suspects, each with the motive and the opportunity. But you don't notice, unless you are very good at this kind of thing, how strong the motive of one of the suspects was, or that he/she had the opportunity to do the deed. There is a sub-plot concerning lepers, which (as it should in a classical detctive story) merges with the main plot before the dénoument. And of course there are damsels defended and dragons slain along the way, and a twist at the end.
Then as always, there are characters who only appear in this one story - like Thomas Rodde, the enigmatic leper who arrives from the north after his lazar-house has been burnt down (with all the inmates except him inside) by raiders from across the border. (Nasty Scots for a change, instead of nasty English, which is so much the fashion at present.)
Quite apart from all this, it is an excellent historical novel. You feel you know early 14th-century Crediton, that you could walk in, fit in, know everyone. And I (who pride myself on my knowledge of the 14th century) know more now than I did about lepers and leprosy, how lepers were treated, and how they were looked upon by the Church and the people.
Perfect of its kind. And note that, also as in all classical detective fiction, the soap opera of the detctive's private life continues. This book follows on from The Abbot's Gibbet, and here Sir Baldwin meets up again after a year with Lady Jeanne de Liddinstone. Will the confirmed bachelor and ex (celibate) Knight Templar marry the beautiful widow who had been so abused by her unmourned and unregretted first husband?
JM
