Give up your foolish plan. If not you die.”When elderly Queen Hanna of Iconia discovers the anonymous letter in her dress pocket, she knows someone in her household is spying on her. The queen is secretly planning a ceremony of atonement that she hopes will secure the royal succession. Journalist Charles Venables is asked to help identify the spy before her next public appearance. But when Queen Hanna is strangled with a museum relic known as the ‘Curse of the Herzgovins’, Venables knows an all too human hand is involved. But how was the murderer able to enter the queen’s heavily guarded chamber? And why was the body found wearing the royal ceremonial robes rather than the clothes she had retired in?Many Golden Age books have a plot involving an imaginary European kingdom, inspired by ‘Ruritania’, the setting for the 1894 bestseller The Prisoner of Zenda. Ruritania became the basis for hundreds of imitations (Lutha, Graustark, and Riechentenburg to name but a few) as well as parodies — the Marx Brothers’ film, Duck Soup, features Groucho as the dictator of mythical Freedonia. The Ruritanian setting was so broadly known that the author refutes it directly in Death of a Queen. When Venables complains ‘This place sounds dreadfully like Ruritania’, his colleague replies ‘There’s nothing Ruritanian about Queen Hanna.’Author Christopher St John Sprigg was a polymath who read widely across history, politics, and culture, and he put this knowledge to good use in Death of a Queen, devising Iconian history, heritage and architecture with an enthusiasm and realism that add to the book’s appeal.
