The Tainted Relic

‘THE MEDIEVAL MURDERERS’

A small group of historical mystery writers, all members of the Crime Writers’ Association, who promote their work by giving informal talks and discussions at libraries, bookshops and literary festivals.

Simon Beaufort is the pseudonym under which Susanna Gregory writes her Sir Geoffrey Mappestone series of twelfth-century mysteries.

Bernard Knight is a former Home Office pathologist and professor of forensic medicine who has been publishing novels, non-fiction, radio and television drama and documentaries for more than forty years. He currently writes the highly-regarded Crowner John series of historical mysteries, based on the first coroner for Devon in the twelfth century; the tenth of which, The Elixir of Death, has recently been published by Simon & Schuster.

Michael Jecks is the author of the immensely popular Templar series, all set during the confusion and terror of the reign of Edward II. The most recent novels in the series are The Butcher of St Peter’s and A Friar’s Blood Feud. Michael was the Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2004-5.

Ian Morson is the author of an acclaimed series of historical mysteries featuring the thirteenth-century Oxford-based detective, William Falconer.

Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym under which she writes the Matthew Bartholomew series of mystery novels, set in fourteenth-century Cambridge, the most recent of which, The Tarnished Chalice, has just been published in hardback. She also writes historical mysteries under the name of ‘Simon Beaufort’.

Former schoolmaster Philip Gooden is the author of the Nick Revill series, a sequence of historical mysteries set in Elizabethan and Jacobean London, during the time of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. The latest titles in the series are Mask of Night and An Honourable Murder.