Rizzio: Darkland Tales

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Flood, Alison (20 July 2012). "Denise Mina wins crime novel of the year award". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 July 2012. Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in the UK who won the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network and is a postdoctoral creative writing fellow at the University of Liverpool, where she is working with the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme. Her début collection Another Way to Split Water meditates on how we inherit the lived experiences of our ancestors and employs figurations of the natural world to reflect on themes of womanhood, belonging, inheritance, loss, beauty and spirituality.

After the marriage, rumours became rife that Mary was having an adulterous affair with Rizzio. [15] It was said (in 1568) that Mary and Darnley's love decayed after they returned from the Chaseabout Raid, "she using the said David more like a lover than a servant, forsaking her husband's bed". [16] According to a French diplomat's report, Darnley had discovered Rizzio in the closet of Mary's bedchamber at Holyroodhouse in the middle of the night dressed only in a fur gown over his shirt. [17] Wealth, possessions and costume [ edit ] Mary, Queen of Scots at the Palace of Holyroodhouse: A Creative Writing Resource for Teachers – Palace of Holyrood House Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley (2007), Great Women Mystery Writers, Greenwood Press, 2nd edn, p. 178 ( ISBN 0-313-33428-5). From the shadows under the timber roof Yair can see the players on the bright court very crisply, the flitting nuances in their gestures and glances. I would not, however, recommend the audiobook. The narration by Katie Leung is one of the worst I’ve heard. She mangles the pronunciations of names that are familiar, surely, to all Scots – like Mary of Guise or Lord Ruthven. She’s a Dundonian – there’s no excuse for incorrect pronunciation of well-known names from our history. And her characterisations of the Lords are awful. Sure, they wouldn’t have sounded like BBC presenters but they wouldn’t have sounded like parody drunken Glaswegians in a sketch show either. Thank goodness it was short.Denise Mina (born 21 August 1966) is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also written for comic books, including 13 issues of Hellblazer. [1] Told from the perspective of several of the characters involved, the story focuses on a 1566 plot to kill Mary, Queen of Scots’ friend and private secretary David Rizzio. Denise captures the dramas of the sixteenth century intrigue but is glad to link to more contemporaneous themes. “There are so many resonances,” she points out. Not least that, “there is no justice that can reach you if you are rich.”

Moment by moment, as the supper room is invaded, Mina unreels events. There is much detail of who is standing where, and holding what. An intrusion that lasted a matter of moments is stretched, as if in slow motion, but all sense of momentum is lost. Yair’s deranged impressions end with him, insane, in a prison cell, covered in blood. Far more gory is the scene of Rizzio’s stabbing, by all who were party to the deed: “It takes quite a long time for everyone to have a go,” writes Mina, portraying some of the murderers as giggling. And although Darnley does not take part, his dagger is left in the corpse, so there is no doubt of his involvement. Ruefully, one of the lords later reflects: “They went a bit mad that night.” Mina is good on the institutionalised and individual misogyny of the period, subtly connecting it to those issues in our own time. Mary will not be believed when she later describes the personal outrages she suffered on the night of Rizzio’s death: “They will say she’s making them up to gain sympathy, a charge levelled at victims by powerful men since time immemorial.” The Earl of Bothwell, her future husband, is introduced as “an adulterer, an adventurer and a rapist”. Mina seems to hold most of her male characters in contempt, stepping outside the story to point out the distance between how they see themselves – as “the Great Men of History” – and what they really are: ridiculous killers and drunks. This is a very male list but the recent explosion in true crime podcasts and documentaries and the predominantly female communities that have formed around them will, I suspect, lead to more women choosing to write these books. Yair knows what is intended that night for Rizzio, and approves. So, obviously, does Darnley. He and Rizzio had been lovers, and that he can coolly play tennis with a man whose murder he has plotted, is a measure of his venality.The story of Mary, Queen of Scots, so often characterised as a romance, was notably violent and grim. Visitors to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh who would like to sense the brutal reality should pay attention to a very small room off the royal bedchamber – it was here, on 9 March 1566, that David Rizzio, Mary’s private secretary and favourite, was murdered. He was stabbed 56 times. The queen, pregnant with a future king, is said to have had a pistol aimed at her belly. This, then, is a crime scene, and so it is appropriate that a crime writer should take up the tale. McDonald, Alan (12 October 2017). "The winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2017 is announced". New Writing North . Retrieved 16 March 2018.

Mary remains one of the most intriguing & divisive characters in royal history. There was no shortage of drama in her short life but one of the most compelling incidents was the murder of her private secretary David Rizzio. Maybe because one of the ringleaders behind the plot was her snivelling weasel of a husband, Henry Stuart (Lord Darnley). Gordon Donaldson, Thirds of Benefices (Edinburgh, 1949), p. 155: William Barclay Turnbull, Letters of Mary Stuart (London, 1845), p. xxxvi. Every generation seems to discover true crime novels anew and is astonished by how moving and profound they can be. True crime is still regarded as a low art form and, somehow, a shameful area of interest. I like low art. I like comics and zines and street art precisely because they’re so poorly curated. Often writers who produce works of this kind move on to more respectable forms and these earlier forays are played down as aberrations or experiments. Lord Darnley and David Rizzio don’t like each other but only one of them can afford to show it. Darnley sneers and looks Rizzio up and down. Rizzio keeps his expression neutral and ignores the slights. Darnley is married to the Queen and Rizzio is her servant. It’s not an equal match. Fraser, Antonia (1994) [1969]. Mary Queen of Scots. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. p.236. ISBN 0-297-17773-7.Rizzio was private secretary to Mary Queen of Scots, and the tantalising opening salvo concerns a tennis match between him and his nemesis, Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley. Underneath that sloping roof is a man called Henry Yair. He’s watching the game, sitting on a bench built into the wall of the indoor court. He’s Lord Ruthven’s retainer, here to keep an eye on Darnley for the boss. Thomas Finlayson Henderson, Mary, Queen of Scots: Her Environment and Tragedy, 2 (New York, 1905), p. 654 I’ve read much of what Mina has written, and always enjoyed it, but this format brings out the very best of her, the grizzly and the gruesome stirred in with occasional pinches of dark humour. Rizzio doesn’t know they’re planning to kill him tonight. He hears rumours and sees the whispering, he knows something is going on, but something is always going on: that’s the essence of court life. The whispering has been intensifying for months, building up to the current session of Parliament, which will finally, irrevocably, divest the Queen’s rivals of their land and power and titles. This Parliament’s proclamations will take Scotland by the shoulders, turn her away from England to face Europe and concentrate power in the Queen’s hands.

Other Calvinists congratulate him on his passion, overlook the implied violence of his fanaticism, because he’s on their side. The Reformation is recent, the issue undecided. It’s not yet safe. Everyone is afraid of a revival of the Roman religion, of being killed for their beliefs, of spies and foreign interventions. Men as hot and spirited as Yair are useful to the Protestant movement. Tomorrow morning, when fellow Calvinists hear that Yair was creeping around Edinburgh, when they learn what he did, who he killed, they’ll all feign surprise, but in the darkness of their hearts they’ll each remember his sallow face and wide watery eyes, his explosive reaction to any hint of dissent, and they’ll admit to themselves that this was inevitable, that they rewarded his disquieting fervour and they’ve long known this could happen. Could have been any one of them stabbed in their beds. Yair was always a killing spree looking for an excuse. When the Queen says her husband is a drunk or a waste of space Rizzio doesn’t nod or roll his eyes the way other servants do. He’s experienced, a professional. He knows that those he serves may deign to treat him as a friend or an equal, but he isn’t. He’s here because he’s useful, not because he’s welcome. David Rizzio makes himself incredibly useful. Joseph Stevenson, The History of Mary Stewart: From the Murder of Riccio Until Her Flight Into England by Claude Nau (Edinburgh, 1883), pp. ciii, 11, 16, 227. Gordon Donaldson, Scotland's History: Approaches and Reflections (Scottish Academic Press, 1995), p. 63: Charles Rogers, History of the Chapel Royal of Scotland (London, 1882), p. lxiv: Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, vol. 19 (Edinburgh, 1898), p. 338.Alexandre Labanoff, Lettres de Marie Stuart, 7 (London, 1844), p. 65: John Parker Lawson, History of Scotland by Robert Keith, 2 (Edinburgh, 1845), pp. 125–6 Part of a specially commissioned series reimagining stories drawn from history, myth and legend, Denise Mina’s Rizzio tells the visceral tale of one of Scottish history’s bloodiest murders. This is an edgy, provocative and thrilling classic in the making, and we are delighted to feature an extract from the book ahead of its publication in September 2021. Rizzio: Darkland Tales