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The Strange Death Of Mistress Coffin by Robert J Begiebing
The Strange Death Of Mistress Coffin by Robert J Begiebing
The Piscataqua settlement, well up the Merrimack River from Boston and Salem, is on the very fringes of civilisation in 1648 New England. Richard Browne, newly-arrived from England, is commissioned by Piscataqua's magistrate to investigate the grisly rape and murder of Kathrin Coffin. The most likely suspect has disappeared, and his abandoned wife has lost children to what she thinks are evil spirits. The widower may be conducting research into magic, and there are locals who justify more than a little suspicion.
The setting and background couldn't be better, and this novel has received much mainstream attention in America, as well as being a main selection of the Mystery Book Club. But for all the shadowy evil Begiebing has assembled, he winds up making lamentably little actual use in his narrative. There isn't much of a mystery here, in fact it reminds me of Simon Schama's Death Of A Harvard Professor in Granta, where Schama 'solved' a 19th century murder by 'discovering' the man who had been universally suspected of the crime, arrested, tried, convicted and executed for it. I suppose he looked at those as clues.
To be fair, Begiebing isn't really concerned with a who-dun-it, and is content to reveal the solution forty years after the murders. His point is the nature of evil within the society we created in the New World. Unfortunately, he does rather too little of his analysis through his story, and leaves most of it for what amounts to an essay to close the book.
Which is a shame, because all the major issues of good and evil in colonial America are there. The spectre of the Salem witch trials haunts the background, while the fear of the 'savages' and the effects of going native on the white population are both explored in some depth.
In the end, though, these crowded little outposts of European life were examples in how people within a closed society may not be able to get along, no matter how many rules are imposed upon them. In the context of such a society, the very idea that a plot like the one which turns out to have resulted in Mistress Coffin's death could have succeeded seems almost impossible.
What makes the story work is the revelation of lies and hidden moral failures among even the most righteous of New England's chosen people. There isn't much mystery in hypocrisy, except perhaps why we're all such suckers for it.
