Written by John Yeoman

Published by Amazon

Review by Charlie Britten

Published in December 2014, The Cunning Man is a collection of historical crime stories featuring the impoverished Elizabethan apothecary, Hippo Yeoman, whose sideline is solving mysteries. The crimes he is required to solve include the theft of a bowl from a locked room which it is ‘impossible’ to enter, the plight of a milliner faced with ruin because she can’t read Latin, vandalism of books and a dead man found in a privy built for the personal use of Good Queen Bess in anticipation of a Royal Visit which never happens. The writer moves Hippo around sixteenth century London with the sort of assurance that is based upon sound research, and occasionally brings some real people into his plots, including William Camden, headmaster of Westminster School and author, and well-known courtiers.

It is curious that the main character has the same surname as the pen-name of the author, John Yeoman. (I gather from his website that this is not his real name.) I didn’t warm to the protagonist Hippo Yeoman. He isn’t smug or a know-it-all (as detectives can be) or have other obvious vices, except a tendency to whinge, especially about his poverty. The problem is more that his character is not clearly defined, with the result that I didn’t get to know him.

Hippo also appears in two novels, Dream of Darkness and Fear of Evil (both published in January 2015) and in another short story, “The Hog Lane Murders” (published in February 2015). As well as being there for the reading, these works, which John Yeoman calls ‘fictionals’, include footnotes hyperlinked to what he calls ‘clever tips’ – for writers – about how they were written. Each story has about twenty such footnotes, all of which are easily accessed using my classic Kindle, although obviously this sort of interactivity would be no use on a printed version. The ‘tips’ provided by John Yeoman, who runs the writing website ‘Writers Village’, are pitched at a beginners/improvers level and often appear to reflect his personal opinion, as in, for instance, ‘Humour is a dangerous thing. Too many one liners and the author leaps out of the story, grinning at us…’ Although many of the footnotes are insightful, his approach to writing is mechanistic, with lots of named tools such as ‘The Indispensable Incident’ and ‘a character signature’, which could lead those following his tips to write technically correct literature bogged down in technicalities. Nevertheless it’s a clever idea and good use of multimedia.

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 Charlie Britten is a contributing reviewer for The Copperfield Review.