Jeri Westerson is ending the Crispin Guest series. It’s a logical point to end it, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy to see Crispin move on. She wrote a post for us to tell the story behind the story. Thank you, Jeri, and good luck with future books.

Ending a Series

by Jeri Westerson

What can one say about putting fifteen plus years of one’s life into a blog post? But here I am, giving it a try.

It was actually 2005 that I wrote down the name “Crispin Guest” for the first time. He was to be my first published novel. A medieval detective. But not just any medieval detective. A hardboiled one, just to distinguish him from the monks and nuns of the genre doing their detecting, or any other medieval detective designed to find murderers. He was a detective for hire on the mean streets of fourteenth century London (called the “Tracker”), and it was to be called a “medieval noir”, perfectly realistic to the time period, and a character with his own romantic entanglements in each successive book. 

As you can imagine, one of the things that draws people to historical novels is the depth of research the author accomplishes. And if a mystery, these particular mystery readers like real history with their mystery. The historical foundation must be solid before you can add in the fictional elements of the people and situations. There’s a certain amount of world-building in an historical, because though people might be familiar with the idea of the Middle Ages, this time period spans one thousand years-worth to choose from. What someone does in 500 CE, is going to be distinctly different from what they do and how they say it in 1384 CE.

So that also meant my choosing a particular time period for these tales. I’ve been a Chaucer groupie for, well, all my life. I was probably the only kindergartner in Los Angeles who could recite part of the Canterbury Tales prologue…in Middle English. My parents were rabid Anglophiles, so all the books, both fiction and non were always available to me. I had a lot of early research already in my pocket before I delved deeply into getting all the details down about England in the late fourteenth century. It was the time of Chaucer that I wanted to write about, and I wanted Geoffrey Chaucer to show up in the books as a friend of Crispin’s, my disgraced knight (he lost his title, his lands, his livelihood because he committed treason, falling for a plot to put his mentor, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster on the throne instead of Lancaster’s ten-year-old nephew. It was Lancaster who pled for Crispin’s life, which he got, but everything else that defined him was forfeit.) So late fourteenth century it was! And with that, came tumbling out all the things that could make good drama throughout King Richard II’s troubled reign. Crispin’s timeline could follow the historic timeline. Each book would be a year later in his life, and he could grow and change with each successive volume.

But first, I had to learn to write a mystery. I had spent a lot of time writing one-off historicals. I liked telling tales of the ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. That, apparently, didn’t work for the average publisher, but using those same tactics with a mystery was the ticket. I wanted to understand the hardboiled detective, so I took one of my favorite books, Dashiell Hammet’s THE MALTESE FALCON, and literally took it apart, paragraph by paragraph, beat by beat, to discover what made a mystery tick. And I got to like the idea of the falcon as a McGuffin, the thing that propels the plot. And so, I decided to add a religious relic or venerated object to my Crispin books—a Veronica’s Veil, the Crown of Thorns—as the falcon or McGuffin to be either imperative to the plot or just a red herring. I suddenly had my series.

Still, the thing that really helped my books was something serendipitous. Crispin was alone as is any good hardboiled detective with a chip on his shoulder. He had no one in his life because he wasn’t allowed his old friends or help from family. Until the street urchin and cutpurse Jack Tucker—who starts in the books at eleven years old—comes into his life. He was only going to appear in one or two stories, but my editor asked if the lad was going to continue with the books since he appeared to be popular with readers. “Uh…sure!” I said. And a full-time character was born. Serendipitous because with Jack’s presence, he serves as the reader, asking the questions we’re wondering about. And as the books move forward in time, Jack grows up. Morose Crispin now has to snap out of it, being responsible for this other young person’s life. And consequently, taking away the loneliness his exile from court has forced upon him. By Jack insinuating himself into Crispin’s circle, he not only pushes Crispin to grow and change, but Jack’s lot in life is instantly made better by food and shelter, being taught to read and write, and swordsmanship, and eventually, horsemanship. Since I like my characters to have three-dimensional lives, this offered plenty.

While I enjoyed the research and the writing, I was aware that a lengthy series could get stale and repetitive. So I always devised an end point, a natural stopping place in the series if one follows Richard’s reign, because, after all, the beginning of his reign as a child of ten was the beginning of all of Crispin’s woes. What would happen at the end of that reign? That’s for readers to find out, of course, with the release of the fifteenth book in the series, THE DEADLIEST SIN, where Crispin not only must discover who is killing the nuns in St Frideswide Priory in the fashion of the Seven Deadly Sins, but he must brace for civil war when the exiled Henry Bolingbroke returns to England to take back his inheritance from a recalcitrant King Richard. Will Crispin have to commit treason again to support the son of his mentor the Duke of Lancaster? It’s a pretty pickle, but an intricate tale and Crispin’s last adventure.

It’s a bit bittersweet for me, because VEIL OF LIES was not only my first published book in 2008, but it was published by a big New York publisher, St. Martin’s. Crispin has been the founder of the feast for me, but nothing lasts forever, and Crispin gets his dramatic ending so that I can concentrate on more series to come. In the works is a Tudor mystery series and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche mystery series as well. Two historicals, two distinctly different time periods and characters. It’s that one-door-closes-and-another-one-opens thing. I intend to celebrate Crispin’s farewell with a hearty toast of mead. I recommend that to you, too.

Thank you, Crispin, for giving me a writing career. And many thanks to readers who have loved him as I do. It’s been a great swashbuckling adventure.


Jeri Westerson writes the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir novels, a fifteen-book series nominated for thirteen mystery awards. She also writes an urban fantasy series, Booke of the Hidden; a spin-off werewolf mystery series, Moonrisers; a gaslamp-steampunk fantasy series Enchanter Chronicles Trilogy; a few standalone historical novels; and a humorous/romantic LGBTQ mystery series, the Skyler Foxe Mysteries under the pen name Haley Walsh. Find them all and any future series at JeriWesterson.com.