According to Dorothy Sayers' fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey “In detective stories, virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have.” The rise of the historical detective novel — particularly the detective novel set in the medieval period — both complements and complicates Wimsey's claim. Certainly, virtue triumphs, but what counts as virtue in the fictional Middle Ages, and what counts as its triumph? To answer these questions, we must turn to ethics. The ethical questions raised by medievalist detective novels fall into two categories: first, questions about the ethics of the novelistic endeavor and its representation of the medieval world and, second, questions about representations of ethical life in the ictional world that the novel generates. Questions about the novelistic endeavor touch on the ethics of medievalism as a whole as we test the possibility of honestly representing life in past centuries, from the simple avoidance of anachronism to the possibility of accessing mental attitudes from periods so different from our own. Questions about ethical life within the novel point us toward explorations of both the reasons why we derive pleasure from crime stories set in the distant past and the similarities and differences between medieval characters and ourselves. Because they frequently deal with pressing ethical issues such as justice, revenge, desert, moral obligation, and so on, detective novels provide a fruitful source of inquiry for these questions.

This article will focus on the ethical attitudes depicted in Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse series.