Garden of Secrets Past
Exclusive interview the author Anthony Eglin and a review of his new novel about a murder mystery in an English garden
Rating: Three Stars
“I knew at that moment that I had the gripping beginnings of a new story,” says Garden of Secrets Past author Anthony Eglin. On an old videotape he was watching was an inspiration for Elgin. It mentioned the mystery of a stone and marble edifice called the Shepherd’s Monument, one of eight Greek revival monuments constructed in Staffordshire’s Shugborough Hall gardens over 250 years ago. Garden of Secrets Past would be the first time Elgin had settled on a title for a book before he started writing it.
Garden of Secrets Past is Anthony Eglin’s fifth English Garden Mystery novel featuring retired botanist Lawrence Kingston. Kingston receives an unsigned letter requesting a meeting at an address in London’s ritzy Mayfair neighborhood. Lord Frances Morley, whom Kingston had bad dealings with in the past, relates a story of murder at Sturminster Morley’s country estate, and enlists Kingston to help solve the mystery without publicity. Who is trying to ruin Morley? Why is he trying to kill both of them?
The combination of gardening with mystery thrown in is a nice change of scenery and will appeal even to those who don’t have a green thumb. The detailed descriptions of the cryptographic codes and deciphering slow down the story a bit, but don’t lessen the enjoyment of reading.
Shepherd’s Monument is a massive marble tablet carved in bas-relief that depicts a likeness of a painting by Nicholas Poussin: an Elysian scene showing a group of shepherds surrounding a sarcophagus, contemplating the next world. Its Latin title, Et in Arcadia Ego, translates to “I too was in Arcadia,” a lost world of idyllic bliss. The tomb in the scene suggests a further, darker sentiment: that even in paradise death exists. Beneath the relief is an inscription of ten random letters, thought to be a code. That’s the real life mystery of Shepherd’s Monument. What does the code mean?
“As if that wasn’t enough to cause speculation, Poussin was rumored to have been a Grand Master of the Knights Templar,” says Eglin. “The Earl of Lichfield, Thomas Anson, who commissioned all the monuments, was known to have Masonic connections. For two and half centuries the monument’s cryptic inscription had exercised the minds of Britain’s finest theologians, historians and scientists, including Darwin, Dickens, Wedgwood and more recently the WWII code-breakers of legendary Bletchley Park.”
To make the cryptography in the novel correct, Elgin asked the help of one of Britain’s most celebrated code experts, author of two best-selling books on mathematical subjects,” says Eglin. “All went well until I needed more help: how to deal with a coded message embedded in the lines of the famous poem Gray’s Elegy.”
Elgin‘s cryptography expert became embroiled in a court case and didn‘t have time to advise on the book. Elgin was on his own. “For more than two weeks I struggled, with what little help I could find on the Internet, trying to figure out the complex process. Daunting for someone who has trouble even balancing a checkbook. At nights I started to have recurring dreams of having written a story about code breaking without having a clue about how it’s really done. The cavalry finally arrived in the form of the American Cryptogram Association, who set me straight with one e-mail message.”
Elgin likes to do extensive research. “In horticultural matters, I’ve only been caught napping once,” says Elgin. “A green-fingered reader politely pointed out that it would be most unusual for wisteria to be blooming in England in July.”
Eglin lives and gardens in California’s Wine Country. He lives with his wife and their tabby cat Pyewacket.
Garden of Secrets Past: An English Garden Mystery (English Garden Mysteries) by Anthony Eglin. Hardcover, 304 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 16, 2011), Language: English, ISBN: 9780312648367 $24.99
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